The literary field of queer cultural production in contemporary India: considering popular queer texts via Bourdieu

Abstract

In The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu puts forward the idea that culture is discursively produced and that the field that informs, constitutes, and problematizes cultural production is crucial towards understanding how cultural transactions, dynamics, and politics work. Since literature is a key marker of society’s outlook on and reception of sensitive subjects like non-heteronormativity, this article focuses on the queer literary field – LGBTQ+-related texts and publication – in/of contemporary India. To this end, I look into trends in publication of Indian queer literary texts in English since 1976 through Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural production of the field of queer literature and consider popular texts like Shikhandi: And Other Queer Tales They Don’t Tell You; Our Impossible Love; She Swiped Right into my Heart, and read them vis-à-vis Bourdieu’s theorization, in order to conceptualize an idea about how texts and contexts interact with each other towards (re-)producing and (re-)constructing contemporary queer culture(s) in the Indian context.