3 Homophobic Petitions, 2 Homophiliac Films and 1 Court of Law

What a day 17th August 2009 turned out to be! The day before, queer-identified and queer-supporting Mumbaikars were out in the streets celebrating their queer azaadi. On the 17th news broke of the fashion designer Manish Malhotra designing the costumes for a short film for free! Of course, this was no ordinary short film. It was the Bengali film-maker Onir's latest venture called Omar. The film centres on the way Rahul Bose's character - a gay man - is blackmailed by a rent boy (played by Arjun Mathur) in connivance with a cop (played by Abhimanyu Singh). The pictures of the three actors appear in this post in the order in which I have mentioned them. On the 17th, shooting began on a Bengali film named Arekti Premer Golpo (Another Love Story). This feature film stars the campier-than-a-row-of-tents real-life film-maker Rituporno Ghosh as a gay film-maker (that must be a difficult character for him to get into!) in love with a bisexual married man. On that very same day the Supreme Court refused again - for a second time - to stay the 2nd July Delhi High Court order reading down Section 377, resisting considerable provocation from two new petitions against the Section 377 verdict. This brought the number of homophobic petitions to three! Bring 'em on! How many more rabid homophobes are out there who are certain that two men or two women loving each other will precipitate the end of civilisation as we know it?

Counter-energize it!

Thinking about a paper I heard yesterday it occured to me that perhaps the time has come for me to coin another word, a compound word. This time the word is 'counter-energy'. I checked the internet and did not find any use of the word, so I guess if there was no such word before, there needs to be one now. To counter-energize a word is to evacuate the othering, derogatory, demeaning energy that animates the word and to replace that energy with one that is self-constituting, self-affirming and valorising in order to counter the energy that the word was phallogocentrically imbued with before. The earliest example of counter-energizing may be the 'black is beautiful' slogan raised in the 1960's, the counter-energizing of the word 'queer' by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991 is, to me, its best instance so far. It is also being used as an empowering strategy by practitioners of fat studies, as I discovered yesterday, 14 August 2009, at a seminar here in the city at the American Centre. There may be, if one jogs one's memory a bit, quite a few other such instances of 'counter-energizing' but I'm sure no one word or no one verb existed to express the act of appropriating a word in such a way that the nature of the word's energy changes completely. It is not the mere act of appropriation, but the nature of the change in the usage of the word which I wish to indicate through the word 'counter-energizing'. I guess in India if queer men started calling themselves 'chhakka' and with pride that would be a counter-energizing act and it would be an act, because we have been taught by J.L. Austin and by Judith Butler how to do things with words! So, it would be an act, even a political one.