Seriously kissed : Sexual freedom and its normative structures in Raja Natwarlal

W. Lenders

The first chapter will be dedicated to conventional Bollywood and discuss how the genre has traditionally visualized sex in its movies.The different strategies offer the viewer a glimpse of sex or sexual tension, while simultaneously avoiding compromising the characters? (as well as the actors?) reputation and reiterating the (Hindu) family values of patriarchal India. Furthermore, the genre has usually positioned the West as the morally inferior by using Western(ized) women and portraying them as sexually available in contrast to the Hindu female who takes the position of the pious (soon to be) wife and mother. Looked at through the post-colonial lens of Indian national identity, they confirm the existing structures of the ideal and normative Hindu family, reiterating sexist, homophobic, and patriarchal views on sex. As a contrast to this view on Bollywood, the genre is viewed as possibly transgressing patriarchal India?s gender and sexual norms from a queer audience?s perspective, as emphasized by Gopinath (2000). The Bollywood film, despite its normative portrayal of sexuality and gender, offers the possibility to be reclaimed as queer due to its visualization of female, but primarily male homosocial relationships, and allowing for cross-gender identifications. Waugh (2001), Rao (2000), and Dasgupta (2012) are a few of the theorists that address this, by looking at the buddy storyline, the concept of yaar, the homosocial triangle, and cases of mistaken identity in Bollywood cinema that open up a queer space outside of the sexual and gender identity categories. As they release specific gender and sexual behavior from their supposed identity categories (male/female and LGBT), these spaces in Bollywood films become transgressive. As queer refuses delineations between sexual/non-sexual, hetero/homo, and male/female, the queer in Bollywood movies offers a fluidity that reaches a larger audience than merely those that seek reiteration of the nationalist ideology.