Abstract
Jordan Osserman offers a case study of an event in India that ruptures assumptions about queerness and heteronormativity. In February 2011, the Telugu Indian news station TV9 aired a sensationalistic expose entitled ‘Gay Culture Rampant in Hyderabad’. In an unexpected turn of events that seemed to catch the network by surprise, the segment generated widespread opposition and outrage, culminating in an injunction from the News Broadcasters’ Standards Authority (NBSA) requiring TV9 to issue an on-air apology and pay a 1 lakh fine. The event became a flashpoint in the fast-moving history of queer India. Osserman examines the fantasmatic universe of queer criminality that TV9 constructed, in order to better understand how the production and dissemination of homophobic fantasy within a local context relates to larger geopolitical forces.
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Notes
- 1.
The broadcast, initially available on YouTube, was reported to Google as abuse by numerous activists and eventually taken down. An amateur English translation of the segment was circulated online by Ram Abireddy. This article is based on research and fieldwork conducted while I was a Fulbright-Nehru scholar in India; I worked with a Hyderabadi speaker to amend the translation of the broadcast where necessary. I was present in Hyderabad when the broadcast first aired and participated in politically organizing to oppose it.
- 2.
Section 377 was a colonial-era law prohibiting ‘acts against the order of nature’, popularly understood to target LGBT people. The overturning of this law by the Delhi High Court was considered a watershed moment for LGBT activism in India. The law was subsequently reinstated by the Indian Supreme Court in 2016, then revisited by the Supreme Court in 2018 and finally ruled unconstitutional ‘in so far as it criminalises consensual sexual conduct between adults of the same sex’ (Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India, 2018).
- 3.
On the malleability and portability of archetypes, the authors quote Carl Jung: ‘No archetype can be reduced to a simple formula … It persists throughout the ages and requires being interpreted ever anew. The archetypes … change their shape continually’ (Mogul et al. 2011, p. 27).
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Osserman, J. (2019). ‘Gay Culture Rampant in Hyderabad’: Analysing the Political and Libidinal Economy of Homophobia. In: Frosh, S. (eds) New Voices in Psychosocial Studies. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32758-3_11
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