Reviews for Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures

The average rating for Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-04-06 00:00:00 Maria Howard the more I think & write about this book, the more I realize how rad/ical it is. Gopinath breaks down the distinction between home and diaspora, private, public and counterpublic, finding "impossible desires" & their queer expressions within the home nation (for her purposes, usually India). she places female subjectivity, desire and pleasure at the center of her inquiry, focusing on how hyperbolic femininity in Bollywood films encodes femme homoeroticism, challenging the closet paradigm with its rhetoric of visibility as the only way to enact queerness/queer critique. I am really not doing justice to the fascinating, iconoclastic cultural criticism and theorizing Gopinath does here. my only real quibble is that I think more focus on the everyday use of these cultural productions and performances, on the public/audience side of the equation, would strengthen her arguments considerably.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-03-05 00:00:00 Misty Heidbrink In Gopinath's _Impossible Desires_, she uses the discourses of diaspora and queerness in order to trouble the heterosexual/-normative spaces created and mediated by, within the postcolonial nation-state. And unlike books such as Ngai's _Impossible Subjects_ or Lowe's _Immigrant Acts_, Gopinath's book takes primary interest in the private/domestic rather than public, legislative arenas. In a sense, her book "places" and names the bodies that books like _Coolies and Cane_ and _Impossible Subjects_ circumvent. _Impossible Desires_ opens up with Kureishi's memorable "My Beautiful Laundrette," then heads into the "debased colonial masculinity" as rendered in _A House for Mr. Biswas_ (Naipaul) and the film, "Surviving Sabu." She also includes in her analysis the Western film hits "Bend it Like Beckham" and "Monsoon Wedding," the Bollywood film, "East is East," the remarkable short story "The Quilt," and the more recent (and controversial)film, "Fire" (made by the Indian-Canadian film director, Deepa Mehta, 1996). Gopinath argues that projects like Naipaul's _A House for Mr. Biswas_ repeatedly erases (by ignoring) the possibilities held within queer and feminine spaces by studying colonial/postcolonial identities through the narrow and compulsory lens of (masculine) heterosexual norms. Nair's "Monsoon Wedding," on the other hand, conveniently capsulates queer identity into a lone (and minor) male figure, thereby pinning "queer" against feminist/female-occupied spaces (i.e. female queerness is never, simultaneously, held within the same bodies). Gopinath's desire, then, is not only to trouble heterosexual norms, but to reimagine domestic spaces through queer female desire: "[I:]t is precisely from the vantage point of the impossible position of a queer diasporic female subjectivity that we can and must imagine diaspora and nation differently" (130). She then reapproaches the "impossible desire(s)" of female, queer space into a space of very real possibilities. _Impossible Desires_ rejects modernity's conventional notions of "escape" into "freedom" (immigration from the "third world" to the opportunity-abounding West) by "rejecting this progressive narrative of freedom through exile." Gopinathinnovatively unpacks and studies pain (inclusion/exclusion), nostalgia, and memory as important sites that create valuable experiences. It is in these subtle, less obvious (i.e., not recognized and invisible within the heteronormative/sexual lens) that we might rework notions of "home" and identity against heteronormativity. She calls for, in a sense, a re-negotiation of voices, sights, and experiences "legitimized" within the bedroom:"home" is not merely a space that we "struggle" or "inhabit"-it exists as both, as provocations and difficulties exist alongside (and also inhabit) intimacy, love, and desire.