Trans*(gressive) Failures: Cis-heteronormative Gaze in OTT Media

Abstract

This study offers a critical textual analysis of trans* representation in two popular Hindi web series Sacred Games (Luegenbiehl & Motwane (Executive Producers), 2018–2019, Sacred Games [TV series]) and Paatal Lok (Sharma et al. (Executive Producers), 2020–Present, Paatal Lok [TV series]). We probe how trans* representations function to maintain normative agendas in a heteropatriarchal nation-state. Further, we examine their potential to reify dominant stereotypes in popular media. Our analysis reveals discourses surrounding hegemonic heterosexuality (Yep, 2003, Journal of Homosexuality, 45(2–4), 11–59), transnormativisation (Puar, 2015, Social Text, 33(3 (124)), 45–73) and homohindunationalism (Upadhyay, 2020, Interventions, 22(4), 464–480) based on two trans* characters—Kukkoo and Cheeni. We argue that the characters are conceptualised through a cis-heteropatriarchal imagination in a right-wing nation-state achieved through gendered and racialised othering. We uncover several mediated failures. First, how persistent male gaze functions to centre cis-heteronormative tropes that marginalise trans*ness and the trans* characters. Second, the dual pressures of Puar’s theorisation of ‘passing’ and ‘piecing’ create normativised trans* bodies that are unable to break out of the gender binary. Lastly, we argue that the Hindu-nationalist state works to co-opt and nullify progressive portrayals of trans* characters through its legal and biopolitical machinery.

Keywords

Homohindunationalism hegemonic heterosexuality transnormativity trans* representation Indian media

Transgender individuals are the butt of ridicule and jokes in films and on the street. Harassment is a way of life for us.… The media and law only highlight our involvement in street-based sex work and begging. Why don’t you highlight some of our pressing needs and concerns and the multiple violations and oppressions we experience? Perhaps you don’t because we are an invisible minority. (Revathi, 2016, p. 62)

Revathi’s question on the hollowness of representation of trans* persons rings as the call in this article. In India, the popular media discourse is derogatory towards trans*¹ communities and has normalised them as antagonists, sex workers or gangsters (Banerjee, 2016). Equally transphobic and offensive representations include using trans* characters as plot devices to add humour or comic relief (Banerjee, 2016; Woltmann, 2020). These tropes enact violent heteronormative erasure (Yep, 2003) where ‘[i]nvisibility, stereotypical representations, and assimilation of transgender people in the media can contribute to the public’s lack of understanding or acceptance of this population, potentially fomenting transphobia and discrimination’ (Capuzza & Spencer, 2017, p. 215).

It is timely to analyse how these regressive and stereotypical media representations coincide with the passage of India’s Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019. It is reported that many trans* rights activists and the Human Right Law Network have pursued litigations because this bill strips trans* communities of their agency for self-determination (Banerjie, 2019; Ratnam & Jyoti, 2019). For example, the Act renders legal recognition to trans* people only through government registration that asks for medical proof of gender confirmation surgery (GCS) and sanctions lesser punishment for sexual abuse against trans* people than cisgender women. Additionally, the Act does not meet international standards for gender recognition (Knight, 2019). However, the basic grammar of trans* identity cannot be limited by law, therefore, artistic attempts or media texts can often play an important role in challenging conservative portrayals of minoritised subjects. With this in mind, we look at representations of trans* communities in OTT (Over The Top) platform. OTT media is seemingly considered more ‘progressive’, with new and bold content and themes that represent a rugged youth culture and rejects the stereotypical content available on television (Sreenath, 2021).

With a primarily young, upper-class, caste, upwardly mobile, cis-heteronormative and mass urban target audience, there has been a proliferation in OTT platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime in the last 3–4 years (Sheth, 2021). According to a study published by Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad Centre for Media and Entertainment Studies (CMES), male viewership on Netflix and Amazon Prime is almost double that of females. This indicates that the content on these OTT platforms is created keeping in mind a dominantly urban cis-male target audience. Several films or shows that were previously banned or censored are freely aired as they do not require similar state approval in OTT format (Venugopal, 2019). Through original content, these platforms have become popular and challenge traditional cable networks (Malvania, 2020). However, we interrogate these popular claims about the ‘progressive’ nature of the content in the context of trans* representation.

We examine two web series, Netflix’s Sacred Games and Amazon Prime’s Paatal Lok.² Both shows are within the genre of Bollywood gangster/noir and portray a trans* character each—Kukkoo and Cheeni, respectively. We examine these shows’ potential to reject or reify the dominant stereotypes in trans* representation in popular culture. Our analysis reveals discourses surrounding heteronormative violence (Yep, 2003), transnormativisation through which trans* representation must negotiate (Puar, 2015), and homohindunationalism (Upadhyay, 2020). These shows are significant to study because of (a) the prominence and legal backlash that these shows received (Barua, 2020; Joglekar, 2018), (b) their temporal coexistence with the 2019 Trans Act and (c) these were the first Indian OTT web series to feature trans* characters.

We argue that there is a lack of trans* representation on screen, and this limited screen presence is etched through a cis-heteronormative gaze. These characters show how gender diversity and trans*ness are constructed using stereotypical tropes for popular consumption. These tropes sustain transphobic narratives and belittle the need for transformative representation for trans* communities. Therefore, our research question is: How do trans* representations in OTT platform function to maintain normative agendas in a heteropatriarchal nation-state?

Methodology

Epistemologically speaking, we view how these OTT shows construct fictional worlds that reify a heteropatriarchal nation-state. As scholars located in India and invested in studying sexual and gender vulnerability, the presence of the first two trans* characters on OTT platforms with their seemingly progressive image becomes important to study. In such a context, the characters and portrayal of Kukkoo and Cheeni hold tremendous potential in transforming the perception of trans* people outside cisgender binaries. It is with this understanding of the power that trans* characters hold to influence public opinion that we write this article.

We used critical textual analysis (Fürsich, 2009) by engaging the context of production and how mediated sociocultural meanings are discursively circulated and ideologically negotiated. We first began with multiple reviewings of the shows to understand the plot, characters and setting of the shows. In the next step, we questioned underlying assumptions and ideological constraints in the media texts. In the final stage, we identified recurrent themes and motifs and analysed them within the broader sociopolitical and cultural contexts.

For example, we examined patterns in the entry and the exit points of both Kukkoo from Sacred Games and Cheeni from Paatal Lok in the plots of the shows, their genres, themes, narrative arcs and the presence of the trans* characters alongside the male protagonists. Further, we contextualise the production of these web series through decisions on the casting of both trans* characters, and to a lesser extent, the representation of trans* persons in Bollywood cinema, and to the passing of the Act of 2019 alongside the airing of both shows.

Trans* Communities and Popular Representation

In 2014, the Supreme Court of India passed a judgement giving legal recognition to trans*genders as the ‘Third gender’. Subsequently, in November 2019, with a majority right-wing government in power, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act was passed, which was strongly objected by trans* rights activists (Banerjie, 2019; Ratnam & Jyoti, 2019) for stripping trans* communities of agency and the right to self-determination (Stanley, 2014). The resistance to this legislation, which medicalises and flattens trans* persons’ gender identity, helped focus media discourses on health, education and employment of trans* communities.

In addition to legislation, the mainstream media and Bollywood also lend to popular perceptions of masculinity, femininity, trans*ness, queerness, gender roles and their cultural intersections. Therefore, we take into account these cultural and legal precedents to interrogate two popular web series for their trans* representation and situate them within the cultural context of changing nationalist frameworks.

Bollywood and popular media reinforce offensive stereotypical ideas about trans* communities or invisibilise them by not acknowledging their presence, ergo, limited representation. Lack of stories that centre around trans* lives and a negligible number of trans* people behind the scenes enable this erasure (Anureet, 2020). Further, trans* characters are largely played by cisgender actors who fail to embody trans*-lived realities. Studies in the past have explored the lack of Bollywood films with a well-developed trans* character in a lead role (Afshana & Din, 2017; Banerjee, 2016; Sabharwal & Sen, 2012). When given lead roles, trans* characters are portrayed in problematic and caricaturish roles, which do not allow the audiences to take them seriously (Pattnaik, 2009). According to Saxena (2011), trans* characters in Bollywood have always been shown as objects of crude jokes where the audience is expected to laugh at them, mock them and deny them. The trans* body and identity are ‘produced through the crosscurrents of heteropatriarchal power relations and appears to be a troubled and abject body drawn primarily within the framework of the horrific or the comic’ (Pattnaik, 2009, p. 22).

Keeping this context in mind, we explore the representation of trans* communities through the characterisation of Kukkoo and Cheeni. The characters of Kukkoo and Cheeni converge and diverge in many ways. The first similarity is that both characters self-identify as trans* but are isolated and not part of any trans* communities. Second, they are sex workers³ linked to the underworld, which enacts their sociocultural marginalisation. Third, they only appear in a few episodes of the show and are always in context to either their sex work or their criminalisation to further the narratives of the male protagonist. Despite these similarities, there are some important differences in how these characters were conceptualised, especially in the choice of actors. While Kukkoo is played by Kubra Sait, a cisgender female actor, Cheeni’s role is played by a Manipuri (Northeast region of India)⁴ trans* actor, Mairembam Ronaldo Singh. The choice of who embodies trans* characters poses a complex representational issue. The casting of cisgender actors in trans* roles, as in the case of Dallas Buyers Club (Vallée, 2013), The Danish Girl (Hooper, 2015) and Anything (McNeil, 2017), received heavy backlash. However, due to the normalisation of trans*phobic content in Bollywood and popular culture, the discourse on trans* representation in India remains problematic. Given this context, we begin by analysing the heteronormative disciplining of trans* characters and their biopolitical failure within a homohindunationalist nation-state.

Heteronormative Disciplining of Trans* Representation

Hegemonic heterosexuality creates symbolic, discursive, psychological and material violence which prevents queer world-making or non-normative sexualities from expressing themselves in media (Yep, 2003). Concerns about how heterosexuality is marketed through media and normalised through cultural reproduction are highlighted by scholars (Yep et al., 2003). In our first theme, we unpack how the two trans* characters are placed in a highly heteronormative universe and reflect on the violence that ensues. To do this, we focus on two important aspects, trans* reveal and toxic masculinity.

Trans* Reveal

Kukkoo and Cheeni face a terrible fate in both shows. While Kukkoo dies from suicide, Cheeni’s fate is left hanging, and it is implied that she will remain in prison. A Trans* reveal to the audiences is an important aspect of both shows. In Sacred Games, Kukkoo’s trans* identity is ‘discovered’ when Gaitonde’s⁵ associate walks in on Kukkoo in the urinal. This is a recurrent cinematic trope seen in the Hollywood film Mrs Doubtfire (Columbus, 1993) and its mainstream Hindi adaptation Chachi 420 (Haasan, 1997), along with comedies like Masti (Kumar, 2004). Here, the trope positions the onlooker as a voyeur who ‘shocking’ discovers the trans*ness of the character while in the act of urination. The construction of the scene assumes biological determinism when visually representing a trans* body and diminishes the possibility of trans*ness as a gender identity. The shock is created again through another scene where Gaitonde coerces Kukkoo to show frontal nudity to the audience, which titillates the audience through the voyeuristic gaze of the camera lens. Further, the trans* reveal of Kukkoo is bound within heteronormative tropes already present in cinema and the visual language has not evolved to allow for a more sensitive reveal. Overused frames of reference dramatise the trans* reveal to produce shock value.

The trans* reveal marks a significant event in the character arc of Kukkoo. Before the reveal, there is a lot of glamour and mystery attached to the character, much like the characterisation of a femme fatale. However, soon after the reveal, she is abruptly removed from the narrative to concentrate on the male protagonist, Gaitonde. Sacred Games is uneasy with Kukkoo’s trans* narrative resulting in her unconvincingly abrupt erasure with elusive justification. In scenes that follow the trans* reveal, Kukkoo feels extremely alienated and says that she has lost her jadoo (magic). She believes that the sight of her frontal body has brought bad luck to Gaitonde and blames herself for his failure in his new venture. In Gaitonde’s narration, ‘She thought her charm was lost because I saw her naked’.

Kukkoo’s reaction is an example of internalised trans*phobia that manifests in the form of self-loathing and incompleteness. She tells Gaitonde ‘If you stay with me, everything will fall apart’. This is a very significant point of discussion within trans* representation in popular culture. As long as Kukkoo was represented as a femme fatale, her character was associated with success and a certain magic, Kukkoo ka Jadoo, but the magic dissipates as soon as her trans* identity is discovered by other characters along with the audience.

Kukkoo is constantly referred to as Parveen Babi⁶ for Gaitonde could see Babi’s face, eyes, body and pain in Kukkoo’s eyes. Similarly, Gaitonde is likened to Amitabh Bachchan⁷ from the film Deewar (Chopra, 1975). In one of the scenes, Kukkoo tells Gaitonde, ‘Unlike in the film Deewar, where the character of Amitabh Bachchan dies, Gaitonde will live to become Bombay’s biggest gangster but at the expense of Kukkoo’s death’. This intertextual Bollywood reference functions as a vague rationale for Kukkoo’s suicide. It is surprising that a character who claims that no one can own her decides to sacrifice her life to turn Gaitonde’s luck around and keep him alive. The show’s narrative does not allow the audience to understand Kukkoo as a trans* character. We know nothing about her: Is Kukkoo her real name? Where does she come from? Does she have a family/community? She is portrayed through the eyes and words of Gaitonde and his cis-male perspective.

The trans* reveal for Cheeni is violent and tied within the narratives of heteronormative spaces of a prison cell. As a child, Cheeni is abandoned by her family on a train and finds companionship in other homeless children who beg and perform popular songs for a living at a railway station. She is raped by a much older cis-male as a child, and this backstory creates a gradual character arc for Cheeni’s trans*ness, unlike the shock or ambivalence generated for Kukkoo. Hints about Cheeni’s trans* identity are dropped earlier in the show, where she is seen wearing makeup or cross-dressing as a part of a group of children who sing and beg. Cheeni’s trans* identity is discovered during a fight between her and a cis-female inmate in prison who calls her a Nepali slut.⁸ In the scenes that follow, she is brutally beaten and asked to strip by a male police officer because the female inmate felt threatened and complained about being assigned a ‘male’ inmate. The female inmate says—‘I will sue you guys; what if I had been raped here? Does a woman’s safety mean nothing to you’. Following her trans* reveal, Cheeni is immediately shifted from the female to the male cell. To ascertain her identity, the police officer-in-charge, Hathiram Chaudhary,⁹ verbally abuses Cheeni and says ‘pant utar’ (unzip your pants). This is an important scene as male police officers are not allowed to interrogate female inmates. Symbolically, this reveals that even though the legal context may formally recognise trans*people, its prison system is reliant on the biological determinism that creates the gender binary. And also, as the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019 conveys, which was in application since before Paatal Lok’s airing, trans*persons are officially recognised as either male or female on the basis of medical and embodied proof of their GCS. This mode of legal recognition of trans*persons results in an individual being recognised only by sex instead of also gender. As this scene from the show and the passing of the Act suggest, this conflation of sex and gender at the site of the trans* person is cultural and legal. This conflation’s function is exclusionary and discriminative, particularly in institutional spaces such as the prison complex.

The disciplining of Cheeni’s trans* body in prison through torture and punishment and shifting her into a male cell is a systemic way of putting her within restrictive heteronormative spatial structures. There is a visually uncomfortable scene of her attempting to bathe (while wrapped up in a towel) in a public bathing area while a male inmate stares at her and masturbates. In such a toxic transphobic prison environment, Cheeni finds herself constantly dodging objectification by the perverse male gaze. Therefore, the gendered and violent nature of prison makes it difficult for Cheeni to cope and survive both in the women’s and men’s prisons.

Toxic Masculinity

Rampant misogyny, homophobia and trans*phobia are normalised in patriarchal societies. Conforming to hegemonic masculine norms creates a toxic environment that prevents alternative worldviews from co-existing. These shows resonate with patriarchal views and reify dominant tropes within a violent universe. We see the manifestation of the male gaze (Mulvey, 2001) and the persistence of cis-patriarchal violence in both shows. Historically, Bollywood and popular culture have objectified women for the pleasure of male audiences, and here we see that objectification extending to trans* characters.

In one of the scenes in Sacred Games, Gaitonde says ‘whoever has Kukkoo, will own Mumbai’. Gaitonde sees Kukkoo to be the means towards gaining power in the underworld, as taking her from Isa will signal a shift in power in Gaitonde’s favour. Gaitonde says, ‘Isa was such a big gangster that I couldn’t get rid of him through a bullet. Rather, in order to defeat him I would have to win over Kukoo’. The perspective of Kukoo is lost here as the narrative erases her struggles and ambitions. Instead, it is saturated by Gaitonde’s ambitions and Kukkoo’s identity is reduced to his perspective: as a means to an end. The male gaze is also very prominent in the sex scenes between Kukkoo and Gaitonde. Kukkoo does not let Gaitonde see her frontal body and is reluctant to reveal her genitals to him. The camera follows his gaze when they perform anal sex and Gaitonde seems to force himself upon her through exaggerated thrusts while Kukkoo’s face is contorted with pain, especially in their first sexual encounter.

After Kukkoo’s trans* reveal, Gaitonde and Kukkoo do not engage in any sexual activity. Soon after, Kukkoo asks Gaitonde to kiss her and says, ‘you never kiss me, we only have sex’. This scene supports our argument that Kukkoo is seen as a sex object rather than as a person with real emotions. Gaitonde obsesses about owning her like a physical possession but is not invested in knowing her as a romantic partner. Gaitonde’s mentor suggests that he keep her as a mistress, but marry someone who is heteronormatively stable: ‘keep Kukkoo on the side, hidden, but marry a decent girl from a good family’. Kukkoo’s trans* identity and her job as a bar dancer make her disreputable. She is not from a ‘good’ family and is not ‘decent’ enough for being in his family. After Kukkoo’s suicide, Gaitonde marries his domestic worker and tries to have anal sex with her. She refuses any such advances from Gaitonde and says, ‘I don’t do the work of a whore’. This dialogue is revealing of the underlying misperceptions of sexual pleasure attached to heteronormative ideals of marriage and how Kukkoo’s character is envisaged.

Therefore, marriage, a heteropatriarchal institution, is reserved for a ‘decent woman’, not a trans* ‘whore’. This idea acquires legal sanction through the lack of recognition of same-sex marriages in India (Anureet, 2020). A heteronormative imagination of marriage devoids trans* persons from knowing love, companionship or a future outside of these frames. There is no legal scope for queer futurity (Muñoz, 2009). Grindstaff (2003) argues that the contemporary debate on same-sex marriages maintains heteronormativity. For instance, Gaitonde’s mentor asks him sarcastically, ‘Why don’t you marry Kukoo, make babies with her?’ In an important scene where Kukkoo’s character has a breakdown after overhearing Gaitonde’s mentor, she screams at Gaitonde and says, ‘I can’t give you a child, go from here.… Anal sex does not give you a child’. Similarly, while Cheeni desires marriage and engages in illegal activities to collect enough money for a sex confirmation surgery to get married, she is unable to do so as she has been arrested and put into jail, pending a murder investigation. Such representations are trans*phobic and problematic because they do not allow gender-fluid constructions or alternative futures beyond the ‘omnipresent sexual binarism of the nation-state’ (Reeser, 2013, p. 9).

Transnormative Politics of Kukkoo and Cheeni

The trans*phobia built into Sacred Games and Paatal Lok is structurally mediated within a heteropatriarchal nationalist framework. Puar’s (2015) theorisation on homonationalism with regard to the trans* body indicates this through the representations of trans* bodies who cannot ‘pass’ and ‘piece’ themselves. Puar signals that the placement of trans* identities within fields of citizenship coerces trans* persons towards normativisation in order to be recognisable subjects of the state. It is on this basis that Kukkoo and Cheeni fail to become productive members of the nation-state and this failure is facilitated by their trans* revelations.

Passing

The first mode of transnormativity relies on ‘passing’ off as if one is not trans* or as within the confines of binary gender roles. For Puar (2015), the trans* body thus normativised aligns with ableism, positions its pre-modified body as disabled and hence inhabits its own disenfranchisement. This renders the trans* body abstract. Hence, we see the emphasis on ‘passing’ heavily apply to both shows.

Kukkoo is destined to be a ‘biopolitical failure’ (Puar, 2015) because her ‘passing’ is presented doubtfully. Her broader, taller body contrasts with Gaitonde’s shorter, leaner frame. And, her wig in style, colour and cut question her ability to pass. When she does not agree to Gaitonde’s request for vaginal penetration, her biopolitical failure is intensified. It does not appear that Gaitonde is aware of why Kukkoo insists on anal sex alone with her trans* reveal yet to come. However, as this article has shown, when Gaitonde confesses his love for Kukkoo, her response is to insist that she cannot bear him children. It is with her death that Gaitonde’s biopolitical success becomes a reality as a heterosexual husband and as an enabler of Hindutva politics.

Now, Cheeni is a sexual victim of the criminal underbelly of New Delhi, which is depicted as a legal and police system that criminalises minoritised sections of society. Her biopolitical failure is enshrined in her nonconformity as a racialised other. ‘Cheeni’ is a nickname she receives which in Hindi loosely translates to ‘Chinese’. It is a slur for people from Northeastern states in India, and it homogenises diverse communities of people based on their anticipated ethnicity (Haq, 2016). She is othered as an abandoned orphan who is sexually victimised by a rickshaw-puller, sexually othered as a trans* child living on the streets and enters into sex work as a means of survival. Her deepest moment of humiliation and betrayal is when despite her seemingly natural act of ‘passing’ (Puar, 2015), evident through her beautiful long hair, her co-prisoner complains to the police that she is a man.

Piecing

Puar (2015) contextualises ‘piecing’ in the biomedical world in relation to liberal economics. The ‘piecing’ of the body sections off its parts for their value/labour in the market economy is driven by neoliberal ideas of the body’s hormonal and surgical malleability. This process works along with sociocultural, legal, racial and medical norms to determine how trans* bodies become recognisable. The medicalisation of the trans* body fits it within a normativised trans*ness. Applied to the context of GCS that may be ‘transformative’, but trans*ness is also rendered into an ‘exclusionary’ paradigm through such surgeries (p. 56). This is because, GCS is limiting due to questions of affordability, while also lending priority to conformative gender identification, aligning trans*ness in its transformed parts to the market and extending the market’s reach to trans* person medicalisation. This ‘piecing’ is based on projecting plasticity to the trans* body while offering safety in the future from persecution and harassment. Concurrently, it also devalues the futurity of the trans*body outside of the limiting gender-normative scripts. Therefore, Puar (2015) sees the medically transformative ‘piecing’ of trans* bodies as ‘aspirational forms of trans exceptionalism’ bound within a gender-normative system. Such a body passes without any discernible signs of trans*ness through its well-executed ‘piecing’, impacting the validity of trans*bodies that do not fit the biologically determined mould.

With regard to Cheeni’s wish to go through GCS and marry Kaaliya, we understand the problem of representation of a trans*body within a normalising heteropatriarchal framework. Here, her desire to become a woman through surgery can be seen through Puar’s concept of ‘piecing’. Cheeni’s entire character arc is built upon saving up to undergo such surgery through heteronormative sex work, and she envisions herself in the future in a gender-compliant body. The end of the first season sees her headed towards a criminal trial though she is falsely accused by the media and manufactured police testimonies. Cheeni’s fond and failed hope of saving up for GCS to marry Kaaliya can be but a confession of a failed queer futurity (Muñoz, 2009) that Puar understands to be a consequence of the trans*body’s delimitation through its ‘piecing’. Where the show is sensitive in casting a trans* person to play a trans* character, Cheeni’s visibility is caught within the frames of a legal system that cannot recognise her through her self-identification. Rather, her disenfranchisement is highlighted through layers of ‘piecing’, based on her body’s questionable ‘conceivability’ due to its perceived sociocultural, legal and medical indeterminacy (Puar, 2015).

Kukkoo’s failed ‘piecing’ is related to the fact that even though she and Gaitonde find love for each other, she feels like a failure for being unable to give him children. Their relationship is foreshadowed as failing when Kukkoo refuses to allow him vaginal entry. This is before her reveal scenes. From this point onwards, her arc heads towards suicide both because she is a trans*person who voices her inability to conceive and someone who understands her ‘magic’ is lost for her lover due to his discovery of her male genitalia. Therefore, for how both Kukkoo and Cheeni are constrained in their body’s inabilities, we see them operating within sociopolitical forces that are linked to the larger ambit of homohindunationalism detailed in the next section.

Deploying Homohindunationalism Through Trans* Portrayals

In our final theme, we turn to how trans* representation and discourses about sexualities are embedded in (neo)colonialism (Gopinath, 2005) to maintain and sustain Hindu upper caste sensibilities (Upadhyay, 2020), and are sustained within tropes of global queerness and modernness (Cruz-Malavé & Manalansan, 2002). Bacchetta (2004, 2011) argues that the intersecting logics of queerphobia and xenophobia are essential to the Hindutva ideology. Yet, in today’s sociopolitical context, with growing visibility for queer movements worldwide, queer sexualities are commodified within tropes of achieving modernity (Cruz-Malavé & Manalansan, 2002), specifically, a ‘modern’ Hindu nation (Ghosh, 2002).

Therefore, the erasure of Kukkoo and Cheeni functions to sustain ideological contexts, to push forward a Hindutva-influenced lifeworld that privileges upper caste Hindu males. The lead characters Gaitonde and Hathiram perform Hindu-dominant roles and drive a status-quoist political future by favouring a Hindu majoritarian state. Whereas Kukkoo and Cheeni are present in relation to minoritising discourse that erases caste, language and religion markers. This implies that we do not know about their intersectional backgrounds. We see Kukkoo only as a trans*body—her linguistic, religious and caste belongingness are not etched in her character. She has no other friends, family, or association besides the gangsters who have been her lovers—Gaitonde and Isa. Whereas, Cheeni’s depiction is certainly more layered in its dimensions; she is a racialised other, who speaks in accented Hindi, who has begged and who was sexually assaulted as a child. However, the show limits her to being a scapegoat in a false trial that protects upper caste political interests. Therefore, Kukkoo and Cheeni are flattened in the absence of a complex set of identifiers and futures. Their lifeworlds are not thoroughly explored, nor are these characters stand-ins for complex trans* people’s problems. The narratives actively marginalise them, and they stand as caricatures of heteronormative concerns that are drawn to ultimately benefit homohindunationalism.

Now, we add onto Puar’s homonationalism, by unpacking how Upadhyay’s (2020) homohindunationalism plays out in these shows. ‘Caste-based violence is integral to Hinduism and intertwined with other matrices of oppression, making caste foundational to any claims of Hinduism as queer, trans and gender nonconforming friendly’ (Upadhyay, 2020, p. 467). Both shows privilege the interests and desires of cis-male protagonists who rise to power/knowledge. Sacred Games traces the rise of Gaitonde, a Brahmin man who attempts to rise in class status by taking up a life of crime. In the first rung of his rise, Gaitonde accedes to supporting communal violence against Muslims, aligning with the Hindu-nationalist agenda. As he gains class ascendancy with Kukkoo’s magic to his aid, his arc seeks out caste legitimacy that her trans*body cannot support. This is why Kukkoo is swiftly removed from the plot, taking her own life because she cannot give him children which is integral to supporting the plot’s Brahminical endogamous social structure. Her trans*body’s script reaches its limit here and the show cannot find any other reason for her to remain alive. Thereafter, we see Gaitonde’s upper caste solidarities strengthening as his gang continues to lend support to Hindutva politics and he gets married.

Where Sacred Games traces the rise to an almost immortal power of Gaitonde, Paatal Lok is led by Hathiram, a cop who belongs to the ‘paatal lok’ (lowest rung, of lower castes or Muslims) of police stations. Though Hathiram is successful in uncovering a political plot, he is unwittingly party to the victimisation of minoritised youth (including Cheeni) as an agent of Hindu-nationalist state surveillance through prison systems. Cheeni is one of four accused in a false plot to kill a bourgeois upper caste journalist.

The intersectionalities of her Northeastern Indian identity, trans*ness, and engagement in sex work intensify her vulnerable and minoritised position as she undergoes multiple levels of social and political victimisation. She is someone from a Northeastern state, is known both as ‘Cheeni’ (sweet/of Chinese descent) and labelled a ‘Nepali slut’. Cheeni is a slur from an Indian nationalist position: it minoritises her within a racist framework that homogenises persons with Mongoloid features. And ‘Nepali slut’ positions her as vulnerable and a suspect that has crossed national borders likely pursuing illegal activities (Subba, 2018). Both terms render her ethnic identity a source of suspicion and questionable citizenship due to her face that does not ‘appear’ Indian (Wouters & Subba, 2013), which corresponds to the contemporary legal distrust of her trans*body’s gender identification. These facets of her identity propel her status in the plot to a persona non grata, where little investigation is required to render her barely citizen, putting aside the cultural and historical belongingness of the Chinese and Nepalis, among a range of identities from the geographical Northeast of India. In the conflation of ‘Cheeni’ and ‘Nepali’, her characterisation is drawn within homohindunationalist-inflected racism in a show where violence is enacted along or affirming caste, gender and race hierarchies. The show’s name itself mythologises those who benefit from the marginalisation of inhabitations such as Cheeni of ‘Paatal lok’ (hell) by those from ‘swarg lok’ or ‘heaven’ that are men from upper class and upper caste positions.

So, the trans* characters enable the narrativisation of male protagonists of Sacred Games and Paatal Lok. The biopolitical failure of Kukkoo and Cheeni is depicted through their failed bodies—imagined through a heteropatriarchal lens that furthers the homohindunationalist agenda, where they are positioned on the fringes of society. They are also on the margins of the plot, where Cheeni is in one episode (episode 4), and Kukkoo narrative arc is completed within four episodes, of the web series. Kukkoo’s characterisation is devoid of religious, caste, family/community, or linguistic markers. In this regard, Cheeni’s character is imagined in relation to a systematic drawing up of characters that are minoritised in the Indian national context. However, she is given little voice of her own, and where she is, she speaks of her desire for surgery and marriage. This is pronounced by the fact that in the Indian context, political and geographical realities are strained to consolidate a Hindu ‘modern’ nation-state.

However, there is an important ray of hope to take away from this article, and that is in Cheeni being played by a trans* actor. Will there be a future of trans* characters on OTT platforms with trans* and intersectional contexts? For now, such representations carry out marginalisation in the portrayals of Kukkoo and Cheeni, which present a bleak and helpless future being hacked into a unitarian nation-state.

Implications

In this article, we reflected on how the messiness of sociocultural positions, legal frameworks and transnational capitalist networks shape trans* representations and their embodiments. In turn, we were conscious of how nationalisms operate through gender, sexuality and race in studying sociocultural representations. Therefore, our article attempted to engage with the intersectionality of trans* significations in non-homogenising ways to visibilise the erasure of queer liberal logic in two web series based on structures of neoliberal capitalist nation-states. As we know, the materiality of sexuality is much more complex than static/uncritical mediated political discourse of control or surveillance. This problem of trans conceivability based on self-identification and through cultural practices of trans* communities within the Indian legal context seeps into representations like this one. The law/economy cannot work with self-identification—both discourses can only be imagined through the gender binary. Even when characters have the potential to use their dominant positions to transgress, there’s no effort to challenge the binary. This failure of imagination of queer futurity built into both trans* characters is integral to this article.

We have drawn on several links between appeals to heteronormative biological reproduction as a biopolitical failure for trans* characters. Therefore, we would like to imagine mediated discourses of trans* futurity based on realities that can be ‘nonheterosexual, non-monogamous and reproductive’ (Marvel, 2017) one that is based on ‘queer time … [which is] … about the potentiality of life unscripted conventions of family’ (Halberstam, 2005). Several Indian queer/trans* and gender nonconforming activists have argued that these liberatory struggles preclude breaking down dominant caste cis-heteropatriarchy (see Upadhyay, 2020). We hope for legal intervention and representations that destabilises casteist hegemony and includes queer and trans* realities so that our mediated visions can be realised.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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