Queering Normativity and South Asian Public Culture

This book develops a queer methodology to analyse a queer archive for the impact of normativity on subjecthood and the ways in which it shapes and curtails gender and sexuality. Chapters demonstrate how normativity functions to mask its own operation, is internalised by subjects, and is continually reproduced through discourse and in material ways. In seeking to make visible the functioning of normativity, the book performs a task of queering normativity by querying that which appears as natural in South Asian public culture. The book engages with both the consolidation and the unsettling of normativity through artefacts of South Asian public culture including canonical figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, literary and cinematic texts, Bollywood films, advertisements, social media posts, and ubiquitous ephemera in South Asia and beyond. Through these texts, the author unpacks the construct of canon, the nation, woman as a post-colonial subject, the home and the child, marriage, same-sex sexuality and identity.


This book will be of interest to scholars and students studying and researching Queer Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, South Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, Film Studies, and Media Studies.

“In this ambitious and wide-ranging book, J. Daniel Luther interrogates regimes of the normal in South Asian public cultures. Beginning from a recognition of the ubiquity and invisibility of the normal, Luther illuminates its operation across a wide range of discursive terrains that confound conventional distinctions between high and low culture including literary and cinematic texts, political speech, advertisements and social media. The very familiarity of many of the texts that Luther reads is a reminder of how normativity works in plain sight while almost always going unnoticed. The book offers a compelling account of how normativity produces otherness across a number of key sites of public culture including the canon, home, marriage and sexuality. In offering nothing less than a genealogy of the normal in the political modernity of South Asia and especially India, Luther sheds much light on the counternormative and antinormative, which are a constant and perhaps even hopeful presence in this stimulating book.” (Dr. Rahul Rao, Lecturer in International Political Thought, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews)

​“Norms, normal, normalization, normativity – a litany of linked terms that have been frequently deployed by scholars and activists writing on and working on sexualities in South Asia. However, few of those writing have taken on the absolutely necessary task of speaking to the conditions of their production, the political economies of their deployment or their manifold histories. In this remarkably useful monograph, this is exactly what Daniel Luther does brilliantly. I  urge scholars of sexuality to read the aptly titled, Queering Normativity and South Asian Public Culture: Wrong Readings Only, so that their own readings slant along the ‘right’ orientations.” (Prof. Geeta Patel, Professor of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures and Women, Gender & Sexuality, Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality, University of Virginia)

“Queering Normativity and South Asian Public Culture: Wrong Readings Only invites us to unsettle structures of normativity that undergird so much of South Asian Public Culture. J. Daniel Luther’s queer readings of “normativity” roam across genres and temporalities, from canonical novels, to popular Hindi cinema, from hegemonic cultural texts to ephemera, offering us supple and meticulous theorizations of normativity’s centrality in caste, class and gender politics in post-colonial worlds. To queer normativity, Luther deftly argues, is to uncover the contradictory cultural logic of the ordinary, the commonsensical, and to read queer life anew.  A deeply personal and political book, Wrong Readings is a must-read for scholars of South Asian public culture and politics.” (Prof. Anjali R Arondekar, Professor of Feminist Studies, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz)

J. Daniel Luther is Associate Programme Director, at the Rhodes Trust, University of Oxford, UK. They are also the co-founder of the international platform and network called ‘Queer’ Asia. They have previously taught at the Department of Gender Studies at LSE, UK as a LSE Fellow in Gender, Film and Media, and at the University of Warwick, and SOAS, University of London. Their doctoral research examines the production and reiteration of gender and sexual norms in South Asian public culture. They are the co-editor of ‘Queer’ Asia: Decolonising and Reimagining Gender and Sexuality (2019).