Hello! This blog is assigned by Dr. Dilip barad sir. It deals with the various literary theories like Feminism, queer study, eco- criticism, and Marxism. This blog deals with Queer Theory, other blogs which deals with other theories are hyperlinked in the end.
Queer Theory
According to Jay Stewart, "Queer theory and politics necessarily celebrate transgression in the form of visible difference from norms. These 'Norms' are then exposed to be norms, not natures or inevitabilities. Gender and sexual identities are seen, in much of this work, to be demonstrably defiant definitions and configurations."
The rainbow flag is a symbol of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) pride and LGBT social movements. Also known as the gay pride flag or LGBT pride flag, the colors reflect the diversity of the LGBT community and the spectrum of human sexuality and gender.
Queer theory includes the studies of both gays and lesbians, anyone out of heterogeneous relationship. Queer theory is a term that emerged in the late 1980s for a body of criticism on issues of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity that came out of gay and lesbian scholarship in such fields as literary criticism, politics, sociology, and history.
Important works in this theory are
Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), described the categories of gender and of sexuality as performative, in the sense that the features which a cultural discourse institutes as masculine or feminine, heterosexual or homosexual, the discourse also makes happen, by establishing an identity that the socialized individual assimilates and the patterns of behavior that he or she proceeds to enact.
- “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” 1977, reprinted in Within the Circle:
- An Anthology of African-American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell, 1994;
- and Ann Allen Stickley, “The Black Lesbian in American Literature: An Overview,” in Conditions: Five Two, 1979.
Our society has decided certain norms for gender and their way of life. It is decided how girls should be and how boys should be. Boys have bread, body hair, muscular body, strong voice etc. and girls tend to have clean faces in spite of their natural body hair, soft-spoken and perfectly shaped body. If girls have muscular characteristics and boys have feminine they are not accept and are made fun of. Even when they are not transgender. Then we can just imagine the humiliation transgender's/ third gender has to go through. When a child is born, we are asked if it is a boy or girl? There is no option for third gender, which indicates a lack of acceptance. Even when we go to buy gifts, clothes etc. for children we have only two choices for boys or girls. This suggests that our minds are not open towards those who are little different from us. It becomes very difficult to live a life breaking transitional or conventional society and going against it. Majorly in our society when such cases come out the basic answer is marry him/ her everything will be fine. They are forced to live a so- called natural life.
Today cinema is the mirror of society. It shows the reality of the world and also plays an important role in normalizing the things which are not normal. We see a large change in the roles of transgender's in Bollywood movies. In old movies of 80s-90s we see the roles of transgender's of third gender was generally used for comedy but today Bollywood has tried to portray the reality of their life and has taken it as a serious issue. It is trying to normalize the third gender. Recently we have movies like,
And many more which brings out the life of transgender and their world. Bollywood is trying to bring a third gender but there has always been a question that why aren't they using trans for its role? Why are normal people doing these roles? And we realize that there are no actors from the third community, they are completely away from it. Bollywood should open doors for them and they should be preferred to do the roles of third gender.
But we see that in many TVC they have used transgender for its role. Here is an advertisement of red labels which aptly describes human nature when they see a kinnara/ hijra/ third gender but they really want nothing but respect.
In 2015, Kaisi yeh Yaariyan, an Indian television series that aired on MTV India from 21 July 2014 to 31 December 2015 was a series on love and friendship but they also looked upon very deeply on issue of homosexual relationship, among the 5 friends one was transgender, Kabir, he never shared his homosexuality. His character is quite interestingly grown in serial and has tried to spread awareness about it.
If we look back in literature, we find a lot of literature which talks about the third gender. And there were many writer who were in homosexual relation. E.g. Virginia Woolf, Lord Byron, Samuel Butler, John Milton etc.
Coming in real life, real society. Cinema and television world is aptly trying to make space for the third gender. But looking around we have a ‘prince Manvendra Singh Gohil’. Manvendra Singh Gohil (born 23 September 1965) is an Indian prince who is the son and probable heir of the honorary Maharaja of Rajpipla in Gujarat. He is the first openly Gay prince in the world. He runs a charity, the Lakshya Trust, which works with the LGBT community.
He was forced to marry and have a heterogeneous relation but later he divorced his wife and announced himself to be part of LGBTQ community.
Celebrities or anyone connected to Bollywood or the film industry are always trend setters. In Bollywood we do have accepted transgender's like Karan Zohar and Tushar Kapoor who have also adopted kids and are single parent.
The world is moving forward and one of the communities is still struggling to cope up among us. Being citizens we cannot largely contribute but we can stop humiliating them and consider them one the among us. Teach our future generation that is is also normal and natural.
I hope this blog is useful, thanks for visiting.
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