Hey good lookin'! Popular culture, femininity, and lesbian representation in transnational regimes.
Currently, four big "Indian: names circulate within lesbian public culture within the United States: the biracial Indian-Dutch actress Janina Gavankar, the biracial model and actress Lisa Ray, Indian-American actress Sheetal Sheth, and Purva Bedi. These actresses have all represented a certain kind of close-to-Whiteness and a carefully constructed "feminine" aesthetic that has much to do with disciplining the racial body as it does the gendered body. In addition, they also position themselves in problematic ways with respect to their racial and sexual identities. What are the consequences of such representation for "real-life" "third-world" lesbians living in Western cultures like the United States in which racist and imperialist gestures constantly frame preemptive meanings about our bodies and our selves? If the only images of third-world lesbians we see are those that are carefully constructed along the same racist and heteronormative ideals of femininity, can racially marked lesbians find accurate models for our own invisible lives? How do these representations affect our perception of ourselves--as women who are lesbian and as women who are not White? How does our "femininity" get positioned within this? Are we the exoticized Other equally available for consumption by hetero and queer Whiteness? How might this only repeat rather than correct imperialist histories of race? How might they further divide communities of color from each other by their problematic selectivity of who gets to represent the racial and sexual Other?
Nair
Sridevi
S
Department of Women's Studies, University of Michigan, 1122 Lane Hall, 204 S. State St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290, USA. nairs@umich.edu
D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D005260:Female; D019513:Feminism; D018452:Homosexuality, Female; D006801:Humans; D007198:Indians, North American; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008402:Mass Media; D012931:Social Environment; D012933:Social Identification; D013240:Stereotyping; D014481:United States