Gender and sexuality: Postcolonial representations in the third world

This dissertation is an effort to analyze the current silence and invisibility surrounding the issue of lesbianism in India. Gayatri Spivak in her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" rightfully questions the legitimacy of the oppressed Hindu woman's right to speak for herself and in her subject-position. Through the use of Spivak's theory of subalternity and contemporary queer theory, this dissertation problematizes the theme of lesbianism within the Indian Hindu context and traces the social, cultural, and intellectual evolution of a strong political lesbian movement to postcolonial India. This study proposes to create a comparative discourse that challenges the established Hindu notion that homosexuality is not inherent to Hinduism as well as its claim that homosexuality is a direct consequence of western ideological transaction into India through literature and media.