Journal of Asian American Studies

In a study of popular culture in the diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires examines literary, moving image, and musical forms to identify the persistent ways queer South Asian women are undermined in discourses of nationalism and feminism. In the process, she demonstrates an illuminating queer and feminist reading practice that attends to the ways in which these women carve [End Page 106] home and belonging in the very spaces of violence that shape them. The queer South Asian characters Gopinath analyzes critique both the male nationalist and heteronormative feminist discourses that represent them. By directing our focus to the unintended, supplementary and supportive—sometimes absent—roles of women within major and independent (feminist, progressive) popular culture productions, Gopinath shows us how women and queer subjects enable the emergence of the subjectivities of others—nationalist masculinity, patriarchy, and even feminist women in the diaspora. One learns and unlearns a great deal from reading this book, as Gopinath recasts our very understanding of diaspora beyond nostalgia, queerness beyond sexuality, and feminism beyond heterosexual normativity. The book takes up the queer of color and feminist principle of centering the subjectivity of marginalized others, what Richard Fung calls "center the margins." Gopinath provides a method that enables a new way of reading that is essential to our understanding of new cultural formations and new representations in transnational and interdisciplinary Asian American Studies.¹

Southeast Asian immigrants to the United States, refugees, parachute kids, transnational adoptees, queer subjects and queer diasporas: new subjectivities within our specific transnational moment comprise the most exciting work in Asian American Studies today.² The emergence of these "new subjects" of Asian American Studies in the post-1965 era, as outlined by Sau Ling Wong and Susan Koshy, challenge us to imagine the proper subjects, literatures, and boundaries of Asian Americanist critique. Moreover, the literary, moving image, and performance expressions of these new experiences encompass complicated production and consumption processes that cross national boundaries. In Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe provides us with a vocabulary to frame these changes in contemporary Asian American cultures. Lowe dares us to imagine an analytics of the multiple forces of race, class, sex, and gender in our understanding of Asian American cultural life.³ With a focus on South Asian public cultures, Gayatri Gopinath's book Impossible Desires launches a major contribution to these debates.

The book begins by framing the centrality of male subjectivity in queer and diaspora studies and the assumption of heterosexuality in framing women's lives—a formulation that leads to what Gopinath calls an "elision and displacement" (5) of queer women in the diaspora. This position of marginality is evidenced by what she identifies as the "failure" of South Asian feminists and diaspora studies to use queer critique in their analyses, in addition to their persistently representing women within traditional realms of the home and nation. While many scholars recognize that sexuality is indeed "inextricable from prior and continuing histories of colonialism, nationalism, racism and migration" (3), as [End Page 107] in the work of Ann Laura Stoler, what may be hampering a truly queer critique of diaspora is the way in which it provides a different model for understanding the schisms of past and the present, the modern and the traditional, and third world subordination and western liberation.⁴ Queer critique recasts both the old (in the sense of the homeland) and new (in the sense of new homeplaces) as sites for heterosexism, racism, and gender subordination and in both sites embraces marginality, perversion, and displacement as part of "imagin(ing) diaspora differently" (6). Gopinath states: "the cartography of a queer diaspora tells a different story of how global capitalism impacts local sites by articulating other forms of subjectivity, culture, affect, kinship, and community that may not be visible or audible within standard mappings of nation diaspora or globalization" (12). She challenges us to imagine other possibilities through the development of an "alternative set of reading practices" that she names "scavenger methodology" (22). Through this method, queerness as the "alternative hermeneutic" makes critical readings of the "impossible" subjectivity of South Asian queer women in the diaspora legible for our recognition of their viability as subjects.

Gopinath's study of queer soundscapes illustrates just one way South Asian diasporic communities are disrupting the narrow view of diaspora as a movement from east to west—a unidirectional flow often results in a romantic looking backwards to the past. The hybrid spaces that can be forged through music, like that of the British band Cornershop and their reverse appropriation of the Beatles into Punjabi, have the potential to challenge restrictive notions of diaspora. However, these hybrid spaces, such as the gathering Summerdance in New York City, are not removed from power in that they have the capacity to retain a patriarchal and sexist power structure despite being an alternative space. This festival provides an apt example of the possibility for queer appropriations of homosocial public spaces of music and dance to become primarily male homosexual spaces, while "the women [remain] seated, many with children in tow, and [are] relegated to being a largely immobile audience for the ecstatic performance of male homosociality/homoeroticism" (61). Here Gopinath critiques the placement of the masculine subject at the center of antiracist politics in the music of the South Asian diaspora. Moreover, we can see how gender and sexual ideologies are foundational to the process of establishing what is old and what is new in diasporic cultures. This critique of the elision of feminism in queer spaces also shows how diasporic subjects are composed in terms of multiple axes of power.

Her study engages independent films like Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1996), literary works like Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy (1997) and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1999), and performance art works by Parminder [End Page 108] Sekhon (2003), particularly for their rendering of generational divides beyond the binary framework of tradition vs. modernity. For example, Ian Rashid's short film successfully tells the story of a queer South Asian man's conflicts with his father, who admires the early film star Sabu's success in playing what the son deems as demeaning orientalist roles. In showing the presence of the homosexual gaze, Rashid breaks the assumption of heteronormativity in the diasporic home. Her critique of female absence, except for the presence of the presumed mother's household labor (laundry drying), asks us to consider how the rehearsal of the Oedipal scene in the relations between men of color resonates for women.

Ultimately, Gopinath's powerful reading of Mira Nair's celebrated Monsoon Wedding (2000) best establishes her formulation of the impossible subjects of desire. Her analysis of the effacement of the queer in South Asian feminism is what she aptly diagnoses as the "incommensurability of queerness and feminism" (137). By placing her reading of the diasporic feminist film against Bollywood films where women carve homoeroticisms out of homosocial spaces, she offers a convincing reading of the containment of same-sex desire and the heteronormative binding of the women's gatherings within the film. This containment is secured through the production and disciplining of deviancy in the queer boy's body. When the cousin Ria's sexual trauma is addressed and resolved as the primary story in the film, the boy's does not warrant attention. It is as if he is relegated to the position of the funny, strange, and peculiar character in what ends up being a marginal story. What is his fate? Is his story dismissed so that heterosexual feminist women may emerge?

In my viewing of Monsoon Wedding, prior to seeing it through the lens of this argument, I appreciated the boy's presence as a queer figure. However, Gopinath compels the imperative questions: Is he visible in his presence? Is his story audible even as it is spoken? Gopinath identifies the suppression of the queer subject within South Asian diasporic feminist popular culture as a problem of the heteronormativity of feminism, not only in Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding but in Gurinder Chadha's even bigger film Bend it Like Beckham (2002). In this widely seen movie, the shutting down of queer desire (129) is clearly part of the South Asian woman's emergence. Gopinath's work reveals that to privilege the queer South Asian woman in our reading of culture and politics is quite difficult, for it requires asking if there is another subaltern to the third world woman. Ultimately, Gopinath forces scholars of Asian American Studies to take seriously the study of race and sexuality in conceiving methods of diaspora studies. That is, she compels the reader to ask, to use Lisa Lowe's terms, how does one apply multiple analyses to such hybrid and heterogenous experiences and expressions? In terms of representation, [End Page 109] perhaps these movies will motivate other films to focus on the characters in their margins. In terms of critique, Gopinath inspires scholars to pay attention to queer subjects. Thus, the main accomplishment here is Gopinath's invitation for us to craft ways of image-making and imagining what has been considered improbable or what has been not quite visible, as she shows us queer South Asian women who craft home and belonging in the spaces where they live.