Can the Gay Writer Speak? The Politics of Merchant’s Yaraana

Main Article Content

Huzaifa Pandit

Abstract

The paper seeks to locate the politics of Hoshang Merchant’s ground breaking anthology–Yaraana - gay Writings from India. Through a close reading of the texts, and the status of the contributors the paper traces the politics of the text. Drawing from a variety of approaches ranging from Wilde’s utilitarianism to Foucault’s analysis of power, the paper argues that Merchant strives more towards a homonormative world order, which forecloses the subversive potential of queer writing. Such a position however risks pathologizing the queer subject as they are closely related with the anti-gay genocidal nexuses of thought that populate cultures. The divorcing of gayness, a political position, from homosexual practices is therefore an overlooking of the obsolesce of this theoretical framework, which plays back into the nature vs. nurture debate, and locates queer practice as simply a sexual preference, and entailing no questions of identity, and therefore giving a lie to the various variant discourses of identity politics that emerge in the everyday life of a homosexual individual. This position of denial would closely conform to the minoritizing view referred to by Sedgwick. Hoshang also closely parallels Gide in rarifying art as an imitation of life, following from the Arnoldian notion, and thus an essentialist assumption, locating art completely within the bourgeois ‘good art’.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

How to Cite
Huzaifa Pandit. “Can the Gay Writer Speak? The Politics of Merchant’s Yaraana”. The Creative Launcher, vol. 2, no. 4, Oct. 2017, pp. 324-3, https://www.thecreativelauncher.com/index.php/tcl/article/view/631.
Section
Research Articles

References

Kavi, Ashok Row. "The Contract of Silence." Yaraana- Gay Writings from South Asia. Ed. Hoshang Merchant. New Delhi: Penguin, 2010. 2-26.

Merchant, Hoshang. "Introduction." Merchant, Hoshang. Yaraana -Gay Writings from South Asia. Vol 1. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999. xxvi.

Rao, R Raj. "Non Normativity and the Double-Ended Dildo: Wilde, Foucault, Sedgwick, Goldie & I." Sahitya Academy Festival of Letters. Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 2014.

Rape by Gender. (n.d.). Retrieved 04 01, 2014, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_by_gender

Sedgwick, E. K. Epistemology of the Closet. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Merchant, Hoshang. "Introduction." Merchant, Hoshang. Yaraana -Gay Writings from South Asia. 2010. 1 vols. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999. xxvi.

Sufism, Sodomy and Satan: Sexual Dysfunction In Islamic Mystic Tradition . 13 August 2008. <https://sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com/2008/08/13/sufism-sodomy-and-satan-sexual-dysfunction-in-islamic-mystic-tradition/>.

Sukthankar, Ashwini. Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1999.