The Violent Homo, Nationization in Tomer Heymann's Paper Dolls and Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

abstract:What if the discursive and political recognition of queer liberation colludes with a nationalist agenda to produce a unified statehood? Postcolonial and transnational feminists have critiqued the political mobilization of GLBTQ rights within the context of nation-state modernity. The politics of queer inclusion and its institutional, normative production of subjects deemed to be (un)acceptable promote the modernity of progressive nations, but also justify state violations of sexual, religious, and ethnic minorities. This article examines Tomer Heymann's documentary film Paper Dolls and Arundhati Roy's novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to articulate how the queer subjects in both texts play a role in and resist Israel's and India's optimization of Jewish and Hindu nations. I juxtapose the film and the novel to demonstrate that their focus on nonnormative, gender-variant subjects works differently: the film absorbs nationalist paradigms, whereas the novel critiques Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim ideology. I argue that queer world-making intervenes in the paradoxical exercise of the recognition of queer rights in the service of the exclusionary policies of emerging nationalisms.