India's Illicit Sexualities: Disruptive Queer Representations in Film and Fiction

This project explores how queer Indian texts disrupt identitarian and aesthetic
categories in light of India's criminalization of "unnatural sex" (IPC 377). The term "queer
texts" as used here refers to cinematic or literary works which implicitly or explicitly
challenge colonially enforced notions of normative sexuality and gender. The objective here
is to read these texts and subtexts comparatively through several lenses, including censorship,
legal prohibitions including Section 377, and the temporal and geographic positionalities of
the texts. These queer narratives will thus be looked at as a methodological tool of resistance
against restrictive notions of sexuality. The project asks whether these texts served as a purely
destabilising force, or whether the failure of these texts to essentially abide by a monolithic,
sequestered, and constrained queer Indian identity speaks to the impossibility of constraining
the "unnatural" in itself.