Identity at the Margins: Queer Diasporic Film and the Exploration of Same-Sex Desire in Deepa Mehta's Fire

In a collection entitled Queer Globalizations, Gayatri Gopinath argues that films like Deepa Mehta's film Fire traverse a complex transnational space in their trajectory of production and consumption that necessitates a supple analysis of the discourses they generate. Following Gopinath and using Fire as a case in point, I wish to argue that the transnational space occupied by a film like Fire is a politically complex space, composed of a right wing-influenced diasporic discourse about women and sexuality and a globalized essentializing of homosexuality in neo-liberal India, both of which are resisted by this film. On the contrary, I argue that its treatment of women's sexuality as non-heterosexual but also not definitely lesbian offers a resistant narrative of women's bodies that could only result from the negotiation of this complex transnational space.