The Media and Communications Dept, the
Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths and
the Politics Department
present a talk by
Professor Sumanyu Satpathy (Delhi University)
The Indian Queer, Media and the Arts
The paper examines media coverage of the vexed subject of same-sex love in India by way of responding to specific news-worthy events such as sex-related murders, harassment, films, and even suicides, elopements and murders. More recently, the call for the repealing of article 377 has also featured in the popular print and electronic media. In these debates conducted through the media certain issues related to India’s “traditional” moral and ethical values are invoked by the proponents and opponents of the legislation. These media events are as much representations of same-sex love as any artistic ones.
How it that questions of ethics and public morality are are invoked as transcendentalist, universalist categories, without any clearly formulated ideas of what constitutes the ethical or moral in the Indian context? Does morality or ethicality pertain to the private or public domain? There is a criminal code to punish deviance from what is natural etc. Does the legal involve the moral or ethical? How can a matter of personal choice be debated in the public sphere? What is the relationship between the private and the public in questions of the moral or ethical? How much of the ethicality of one’s sexual choice is of public consequence? How is it that a case of crime and punishment being taken to the sphere of the sexual orientation of the victim, and becomes and occasion for public debate on the ethicality of a gayman’s personal life?
These are some of the questions that the paper seeks to address making use of news paper clippings, film clips and scanned paintings and sketches.
Friday 3 November 5pm-7pm
Goldsmiths Cinema (RHoggart Building)
All Welcome
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