Law’s Filmy Imaginations about the South Asian History of Queerness

Speaker: Swethaa Ballakrishnen, Professor of Law, and Professor of Sociology, Asian American Studies, and Criminology, Law and Society, UC Irvine

Aromantic and non-conjugal relations have attracted the minor-est of jurisprudences. The fractionality of interest in this line of inquiry is perhaps evident. Although often public, non-romantic amity remains mostly unaccounted for in law and its institutional extensions. Scholars have commiserated about law’s implications for singleness and there is some literature on law’s indifference to friendship, but there is less – despite a growing population - about asexual human intimacy that transcends friendship to be a kind of chosen familial love without neat category. In this research I consider law’s contentious connection to non-sexual kinship and contrast it against a growing South Asian popular film archive about kinship, friendship, and aromantic love.

I consider this view from the south for considering utopic legal possibility for two main reasons. First, visual legacies and the impact they have on cultural politics has been a site of inquiry for scholars of public culture and my choice of popular visual sites (rather than more nuanced representation intended for specific audiences) is similarly to excavate the opportunity they offer for considering the state of mainstream acceptability and representation. Should law be reflective of normative order, or at least aspire to hold witness to it in its deliberations, then keeping track of the evolving architectures of sociality seem pertinent. Second, beyond being sites of “non-law” (to the extent they exist), commitments to subversion – especially as we consider love’s laws - are strengthened when we consider global visual sites beyond the Western canon that prefiguratively offer new ways of considering amity and asexual intimacy within legal discourse.

This event is hosted by the project and

Host or Publisher Edinburgh Law School, University of Edinburgh