Presentation Schedule
Straightening Kamala Das: Queer Erasure and Cinematic Sanitisation in the Malayalam Biopic Aami (104691)
Session Chair: Natalie Quinn Walker
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Wednesday, 13 May 2026 14:20
Session: Session 3
Room: Live-Stream Room 2
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
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Dialogues around women’s sexuality have historically unsettled dominant social norms and provoked discomfort within the social consciousness. This discomfort intensified when a woman openly writes about the body and her desires. The agency produced through such a female gaze is inherently non-normative. Kamala Das, one of India’s most provocative modernist bilingual writers, embodies this disruption. Her autobiography My Story foregrounds a fluid female gaze, same-sex intimacies, and forms of identification that exceeded heteropatriarchal expectations, leading to a troubled reception in Kerala’s cultural space. Drawing on Rosemary George’s reading of My Story as a queer text operating “at a tangent to the normative,” this paper interprets Das's autobiography as a site where “queer multiplicities” interrupt the linear logics expected of a woman in Kerala. Following Sara Ahmed, I argue that when a subject’s will refuses societal expectations, she becomes a “female troublemaker,” aligned with the socially unintelligible “feminist killjoy.” This paper examines what happens when such a non-conforming figure is adapted for mainstream cinema. Through a comparative analysis of My Story and the Malayalam biopic Aami (2019), I demonstrate how the film erases queer complexities and reconfigures Das into a recognizable heteronormative framework. Building on Grace Lavery, I describe this narrative strategy as “heterosexual closure,” through which queer ambiguity is domesticated through heteronormativity to render Das culturally acceptable to a mainstream audience. By foregrounding this dynamic, the paper situates Aami within broader patterns of queer erasure in mainstream media, revealing how cinema straightens non-normative queer regimes for social comfort and legitimacy.
Authors:
Maneesha K P, Central University of Tamil Nadu, India
About the Presenter(s)
Ms. Maneesha K. P. is a research scholar in the Department of English Studies at the Central University of Tamil Nadu, India.
See this presentation on the full schedule – Wednesday Schedule
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