At home with their queerness: same-sex relationality and the Indian family in advertising media

The legal battle around the reform of Section 377 of the Indian Penal
Code brought the provisional decriminalization of homosexuality in
2009, which was overturned by the Supreme Court of India in 2013.
Queer politics in India thus stands at a critical juncture regarding
the goal to foster social acceptance of LGBT individuals. This paper
offers an analysis of two recent media representations in India—a gay
matrimonial ad and an online advertisement for an ethnic apparel
brand featuring a lesbian couple—to demonstrate how the Indian
family is emerging as an important arbiter of queer relationality. The
negotiation of same-sex relations within the familial is premised
on bourgeois notions of class, caste and gender, an ideological
normativity that queer of color critique and queer theory have
foundationally put up resistance to. This paper goes beyond the queer
and feminist critiques of gender and class normativity to suggest
that queer visibility in the Indian context is being negotiated not in
opposition to, but through, the mandates of the familial.