Published Online:September 2024
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES020924
Author Name:Ankita Chatterjee and Sutanuka Banerjee
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:13-28
This paper aims to critically analyze the deployment of ‘gay man’ as an identity category in Sharif D Rangnekar’s autobiographical account Straight to Normal: My Life as a Gay Man (2019). The frequent usage of sexual identities in ‘coming out’ narratives often tends to reiterate and reify sexuality as a well-defined concept. Using Queer Theory’s approach to identity and Akshay Khanna’s postcolonial critique of categorical identities, it situates the multilayered nuances of ‘gayness’ and foregrounds how the hegemony of the sexual identity framework in India engenders psychological and moral dilemmas. It explores spaces like family, school, and workplace, which discursively enforce the culturally dominant images of gay men as effeminate, and unnatural, and treat them as social outcasts. And simultaneously, it probes into the problematics of negotiating the subjective experiences within the emergent collective gay community spaces, which are often dynamic and characterized by the specific community codes of socialization and intimate behavior. The paper highlights this dichotomy as it results in the psychological ambivalence of the narrator, which gets manifested in the alternating tone of the autobiographical voice, and argues how it offers a different approach to identity politics in India.
The initiation of the legal battle for the decriminalization of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code in the 1990s marks an important juncture in the trajectory of queer politics in India.