Schedule

Is there a place for queerness in Indian fairy tales? This lecture will explore the tropes of queerness in late 19^th and early 20^th century Bengali rupkatha (fairy tales) alongside contemporary Indian queer fairy tales to trace how depictions of queerness in Indian fairy tales have evolved over time. While 19-20^th century Bengali rupkathas do not offer explicitly queer resolutions, they contain queer possibilities in transgressive elements (e.g., non-normative relationships, gender fluidity, and queer desire) that challenge heteronormative social structures. Although the majority of these tales portray queerness as deviance from the norm which warrants punishment, some also employ queerness as an enabling tool for subverting heteronormative expectations with complex, liminal, queer characters. In contrast to 19-20^th century rupkathas which require interpretative queering of the tales to uncover their latent elements of queerness, contemporary Indian queer fairy tales, however, explicitly feature queer characters and resolutions. Furthermore, with their subversion of the fairy-tale formula with magical realist tropes, and the queer treatment of the concept of “reproductive future” in traditional fairy tales, these modern tales queer the genre of fairy tale itself, indicating a shift in how fairy tale as a narrative category is understood and reimagined by the queer folk in contemporary India.