Familialization of the 'deviant': a hindrance to queer community building?

Familial acceptance of queer relationships has long been at the centre of the same-sex marriage discourse in India. This is no coincidence since in India family as an institution represents caste, religious, class and other social privileges. Developing on Bordieu's work on family, this paper examines three Hindi films— Ek Ladki Ko Dekha To Aisa Laga (2019), Shubh Mangal Zaada Savdhaan (2020) and Badhaai Do (2022)—to formulate the 'ideology of familialization' as the basis of the queer narratives in these popular film texts. Through narrative analysis of these texts, this paper argues that these narratives function at two levels: one, at the level of inducting the erstwhile subjects of developmentalist economy into the neoliberal economy; and two, they selectively transform the familial space of these subjects to make it conducive to integrate LGBTQ persons. The narratives perpetuate a consensus about the importance of selective co-option of queer individuals within the socially dominant traditional families, to keep the cycle of social privilege undisturbed by producing what Bordieu calls 'unproblematic inheritors'. This, I argue, prevents the individual queer characters from building a modern queer community, a radical collective with intersectional politics at its heart, at the cost of alienating those who do not come from such caste/class privilege. This serves the interest of both the neoliberal market/State and the Hindu upper caste dominated social, perpetuating the Ideology of Familialization which eventually has the power to function as a governmental tool of transforming the 'deviant' lovers into 'model' queer citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]