12

“Hey! She’s a Bro!”

Tomboys, Body Image, and Desire in India

KETAKI CHOWKHANI

Introduction

Tomboys present to us a particular deviation from the ideal of the heteronormative female body. Not only do they challenge gender norms, but they also, and more importantly, upset normative female body image. As the aforementioned epigraphs suggest, tomboys do not want to be girls, be called girls, or even do things that girls conventionally do. At the same time, if they are heterosexual female protagonists like Anjali from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Johar 1998) and Sanju from Main Hoon Na (Khan 2004)—two popular Hindi films produced by neoliberal India—they are not considered desirable or attractive by men they are friends with.¹ Lookism in relation to tomboys has deep effects on their romantic and sexual desirability as well as their self-identity. Unlike other forms of lookism, being a tomboy puts into question the femininity of women themselves, existing within that grey area among woman, trans man, and man. While Judith Halberstam (1998), in her foundational study of female masculinity, notes the futility of the tomboy narrative (8) and concentrates on “queer female masculinity almost to the exclusion of heterosexual female masculinity,” since the latter “represents an acceptable degree of female masculinity as compared to the excessive masculinity of the dyke” (28), I argue that the category of the tomboy—and especially that of the heterosexual tomboy—is productive since it troubles our ideas of femininity, body image, desire, gender relations, and heteronormativity. My chapter weaves autoethnography, narratives from tomboys, and analysis of Hindi cinema to uncover how the cultural construct of the tomboy affects body image, self-identity, desire, and gender relations in India. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section examines some of the complexities of self-identity and body image experienced by tomboys, and the second section unpacks the question of desire among tomboys. While many tomboys experience tomboyism as pleasurable, the discrimination and pain that tomboys face in their deviance from heteronormative feminine ideals becomes most apparent in their search and desire for male partners. Simply put, I point out how, in an appearance-conscious society, romantic desire sharply brings to the fore their failure to perform ideal femininity, especially with relation to their bodies.

There is little research on embodiment issues among tomboys in the Indian context. I specifically examine heterosexual tomboys since studies of female masculinity (Halberstam 1998) or female-to-male (FTM) persons in India (Shah et al. 2015) locate the masculinity of women and girls within queer identities, leaving heterosexuality and cis-gendered personhood underexplored. As the narratives of the tomboys in the following sections demonstrate, it is easier for society to deal with the gender transgressions of tomboys by locating them within lesbianism and transgenderism rather than accepting their transgressions as a challenge or an alternative to heterosexual femininity. In part, I borrow from Emma Renold (2008) in understanding tomboyism as a form of girlhood and femininity rather than as a form of transgenderism or female masculinity.

Significantly, tied to this exploration of the tomboy is the question of female body image and lookism. Lookism is “a form of discrimination based on an individual’s physical appearance” (Granleese 2016, 1) and has been primarily studied in the context of discrimination in the workplace (Minerva 2017, 3). While it might be common knowledge that lookism affects one’s romantic life (3), it has not been studied in the Indian context or examined for its effects on the self-identity and femininity of women. Trying to understand the lookism faced by tomboys in India helps us understand the complexities of body image that girls and women face outside the limited and limiting binary of female attractiveness/unattractiveness. To this effect, I seek to ask the following questions: What are the issues of body image that tomboys face? What does being a tomboy do to desire and gender relations in the family and in school? What are the messages of masculinity and femininity that tomboys receive from the family? Is tomboy an aspirational category or an aspiration for girls to have access to the freedoms enjoyed by boys?

My chapter draws on the narratives of six middle-class, heterosexual women between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-nine, reflecting on their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood to talk about their experiences of being a tomboy. One of these is an autoethnographic narrative. For most of these women, the discrimination they faced for being a tomboy was neither uniform nor homogenous. Instead, their experiences are based on various factors related to their departure from heteronormative feminine ideals, which include Indian culture’s associations with colorism (Parameswaran 2011), “unfeminine” clothes, “boy-cut” hair, “masculine” gait, and the absence of prominent breasts. The women appearing in this chapter belong to different religious and linguistic communities and live in Chennai, Hyderabad, Pondicherry, Dehradun, Mumbai, and Manipal. Their backgrounds are similar: educated, English speaking, middle-class, and urban. And they are all in so-called respectable professions. This, however, is not a representative sample, and the group of interviewees is purposefully small because the attempt is to open up the question of tomboyism, body image, and desire to closer examination for future studies. The chapter’s scope is also limited because it specifically examines a homogenous group of women who are middle-class and English educated.² Apart from fieldwork, the chapter also draws on Hindi cinema over the last few decades to build a cultural context and to substantiate narratives from the women participants. Specifically, this chapter draws upon Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Main Hoon Na,³ each of which have a tomboy character. They are important to analyze here since they are popular cultural representations of the discrimination that many of tomboys in my study face, such as lack of desire from men for being tomboyish, social ridicule for not being heteronormatively attractive, and the pain and unspeakability of failed desire.

Tomboys, Gender Identity, and Bodily Freedoms

In this section I examine how the participants in my study identified as tomboys, how they were perceived by others as tomboys, and how this affected their body image. All participants self-identified as tomboys up to and into their early adulthood. Only thirty-year-old Ray, who is married to a man, still continues to identify as a tomboy today. Echoing the quote from Enid Blyton’s book at the beginning of the chapter, most of the participants maintain that they do not want to be a girl or be identified as one and would prefer to be called a boy or be a boy. Another participant, twenty-three-year-old Alice, opened our conversation by revealing, “For the longest time as a child I didn’t want to be a girl, I was very uncomfortable being one. I thought it was very freeing [being a tomboy], I thought the more feminine I was the more restricted [it was].” This presents tomboyism as an aspirational category that allows a girl like Alice to access the freedoms of being a boy. But as covered later, this is not the only reason Alice gives for being a tomboy. Similarly, another participant, Sivagami, expresses that she was “comfortable with [being a] boy” and that she “used to act like a boy.” While she stopped being a tomboy in her early twenties, the reasons for which are explored in the next section, Sivagami explained how much she enjoyed being a tomboy. “I really, really enjoyed it. It was no pressure, so comfortable. I saved a lot of time, without having to spend time on being a girl, dressing up like a girl, walking like a girl, run anywhere, it was comfortable and I am so happy. I think I liked being myself as a tomboy better than what I am now,” she claims. Like Alice, Sivagami experienced the freedoms and joys of being a tomboy since she was not restricted by strict codes of femininity. She also describes it nostalgically as her most preferred mode of being.

Thirty-five-year-old Mira, another of my other participants, also speaks about the pleasures of being a tomboy. She notes, “My greatest joy and pleasure lay in being identified as a boy. When I was thirteen, I visited Mumbai for the first time. As I stood in a queue at Essel World, a couple of girls behind me exclaimed boy upon seeing me. I still remember the thrill and pleasure I felt back then. I loved to perform a boyish masculinity. It was fun and desirable to be one of the boys, it was fun to be like the boys.” Unlike Alice and Sivagami, Mira did not deploy tomboyism as a means to gain access to male privilege. Nevertheless, she describes it as a pleasurable and desirable experience. While Mira experiences tomboyism as a thrilling experience, George’s aspirations are associated with a wayward and partly hegemonic masculinity. George, yet another of my participants, claims, “When I was little I was asked what I want to be, I used to say I want to be a boy, ride a bike . . . like a mohalla lafanga [neighborhood rowdy].” While George does not explicitly mention the privileges of being like a boy, she does aspire to be carefree and fearless like a rowdy man. Tomboyism for her is an adolescent as well as an adult dream. George also mentions that she first came across the word tomboy while reading Enid Blyton. She notes, “That was the first time that I saw a representation of myself over there. This is a girl, who looks like a boy, who wants to be a boy, she just wants to run wild, that’s it. She just wants to be herself. Those were things that I also felt. This is exactly me.” George here explains the importance of a text like Famous Five and the role it plays in representing scores of tomboys like her. She notes that if we today were to completely disengage with Enid Blyton for her racist and patriarchal content, we would lose this important source of representation for young tomboys. Similarly, Tara, another participant in my study, spoke about the influence of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series on her life. She mentions how her cousins and friends, growing up in the 1990s, were reading Enid Blyton’s detective novels and often said to her, “You are like George.” In these narratives, we see the important role children’s literature, especially Enid Blyton’s books, plays in constructing childhood and adolescent gender identities among many Indian children.

Tied to the pleasures of being a boy is the centrality of sports. Ray, Alice, George, and Sivagami mention that they grew up around boys who were cousins, brothers, friends, and neighbors and that this influenced and shaped their tomboyism. They all loved playing sports with these boys. George recounts that she played cricket with her male cousins, much to her mother’s chagrin. Ray narrates that she played sports in college and was part of the gang of sporty girls, as opposed to being part of the girly girl, nerdy girl, or teacher’s pet gang. She did roller-skating and was often out on the streets playing with her brother and other boys. Alice gleefully notes that she used to wrestle with her male cousins and brother and found it odd that the girls in her school were not interested in wrestling. Her relatives and neighbors were simultaneously shocked and annoyed by her unfeminine behavior and body language. Sivagami says that she would be running everywhere, instead of walking like a “proper” girl. This trope of the sporty tomboy is well represented in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, where the tomboy protagonist, Anjali, is shown playing basketball skillfully and inevitably defeating the hero.

Along with their love for sports, tomboys are also more comfortable around boys than girls. Alice notes that she could not comprehend the conversations girls in her school had and preferred to not befriend them. She was not particularly fond of them and felt that she was not only different but more competent than the other girls. In fact, Alice’s position resonates with Anjali’s tomboy character from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, who also distances herself from other girls because she is not like the girls that her best friend, Rahul, flirts with. This, of course, is before Anjali’s transformation into a feminine woman, which gets her the affection and attention of Rahul. On similar lines, the real-life George mentions feeling superior to the girls she grew up with since she was a tomboy and hence better than them in many activities. In this context, Sivagami and Ray also mention how some girls thought that they were rowdy. Sivagami especially got along better with the rowdy back-bencher boys than the studious ones of the front benches. She did have girlfriends, but she was far more comfortable with the boys. This notion of being more competent or superior to girls because of being like the boys is present in the tomboys’ narratives as well as the cinematic representations of tomboys. While some of this stems from the patriarchal idea of the superiority of masculinity over femininity, the tomboys’ experiences also suggest a challenge to emphasized femininity and a conscious distancing from it. As covered later, this distancing from other girls is also a result of being shamed for being boyish, as well as an inability to genuinely connect with feminine activities.

Tomboys, Femininity, and Experiences of Lookism

Lookism, as my study demonstrates, plays a large part in the dynamics between the tomboys and other girls. It is also intimately connected to tomboys’ experiences of their bodies. Alice mentioned being teased at her all-girls school for being too fat, and Sivagami and Ray spoke about being told at work and school that they were flat chested. Notably, tomboys’ body image is a careful performance with clothes and hair. Mira mentions that she had “boy-cut hair (short hair)—partly during my childhood but mostly during my adolescent years. I was underweight, thin and tall and often wore pants, shorts or even skirts.” Everyone except Ray had boy-cut hair while growing up, and Sivagami gleefully mentions that she even got herself tonsured on one occasion. Ray laments not being allowed to cut her hair since she learned Bharatnatyam, a classical Indian dance form. George mentions how she was often forced to wear a frock, but she resisted. She mentions that she would follow butch fashion,⁴ which she thought was smart and sophisticated rather than associated with queerness. She bought loose clothes that were too large for her so that her breasts were not visible or accentuated. George distinguishes between her tomboyism and transgenderism by explaining that she did not bind her chest. Rather, she wanted to inhabit an androgynous body and compared her bodily image with George’s from Blyton’s Famous Five. Sivagami likewise recounts how she always wore shorts, T-shirts, and “normal Bata flip-flops” and tore her jeans at the feet so that it did not look girly. She felt that the tomboy look was more about hair than clothes. She also discusses how her male cousin’s masculine clothes were passed on to her, allowing her to have nice boy clothes. Interestingly, until she was ten, Sivagami would run around topless at home, and her parents were thankful when she wore clothes outside. She describes instances when she was asked to wear girls’ clothes and she obliged since these were rare occasions.

Not all my participants, however, enjoyed wearing feminine clothes even if it was a one-off occasion. George recounts how she resisted when her mother insisted she wear frocks. Alice narrates how she used to buy clothes from the men’s section and kept her look simple with plain black shirts and jeans. She mentions that “it was just easier to wear masculine clothes, because it was difficult to find clothes that I thought looked flattering on me as a woman.” Similarly, Ray recounts that she hated wearing frocks and always chose to wear pants. She preferred loose and baggy clothes and felt uncomfortable in tight clothes. Tara describes herself as an eleven-year-old who wore kajal,⁵ eyeliner, shorts, and boots; she had very short hair and would go out with a large, ferocious dog on a chain. Tara describes this scene as tomboy/butch. One can see how her embodied experience of being a tomboy involves makeup, too, and upsets a stereotypical understanding of tomboys as not interested in any form of makeup or jewelry. While some tomboys enjoy wearing lose clothes to hide signs of their feminine physique, others wear makeup, indicating the heterogeneity of tomboy existence—and in the process challenging all existing notions of femininity and lookism.

The other trope of tomboy identity that I came across in the narratives is being tough, not crying, and not being afraid. Mira reveals that she enjoyed being “tough and to be never seen crying in public.” But she claims that she “never had enough physical strength. The ‘feminine’ girls were often physically stronger than me and I felt like the lack of physical strength was a failure to perform a certain masculinity.” George, on the other hand, never experienced the weakness of a girl and went out of her way to prove her lack of fear. She repeatedly mentions that her risk-taking behavior was due to her desire to prove herself to others, rather than an innate sense of bravery or fearlessness. Mira’s tomboyism was not restricted to clothes since she even wore skirts, but her tomboyism included the performances of normative boys—not crying, being tough, and playing with the boys. For Mira, tomboyism is experienced both as a source of pleasure and as a sense of failure to perform a kind of hegemonic masculinity. Strikingly, such narratives open to us ways in which tomboys can or cannot perform masculinity. They complicate the idea that tomboyism is necessarily about agential transgressions and breaking of gender binaries. Feminist theorists like Bordo (1993, 57) have examined how negative body image, and the resultant lack of self-worth and confidence, is an inherent part of being a woman today. I extend this to think about performances not just of femininity among women but also of masculinity. Mira’s embodied experiences of being a tomboy point to the sense of failure in not being able to conform to either emphasized femininity or hegemonic masculinity.

Clearly, tomboys share a complicated relationship to their bodies. Mira and Sivagami mention being very thin and lean. While Mira is tall, Sivagami barely reaches five feet. She shared that part of her parents’ acceptance of her tomboyism had to do with her being so skinny, flat chested, and tiny that it erased many signs of femininity. The other reason for their acceptance was that her family wanted a boy. Since her older sister was socialized as a girl, it was easier for them to accept Sivagami as a tomboy.⁶ Mary John (2014) mentions that son preference in India is less about desiring only sons and more to do with having at least one son. Even though Sivagami plays the role of a son, she still had to grow up and marry a man and perform the duties of a wife and mother. But while she was growing up, her family’s son preference allowed her the space to explore tomboyism. Unlike Sivagami, Ray and George have a different relationship with their families and relatives. Ray discusses how, on a number of occasions, she was suspected of being a lesbian, and George mentions how her mother tried to scare her into femininity by telling her about the painful process of sex reassignment surgery. As mentioned earlier, this shows how easy it to socially locate tomboyism within lesbianism and transgenderism rather than use tomboyism to destabilize heterosexuality and normative assumptions about femininity.

If this is true, it is also true that there are overlaps between tomboyism and transgenderism. Alice and George both mention how they were shocked and hated getting their periods; they were waiting to achieve menopause. This is similar to FTM and trans men’s experiences of periods and their sense of betrayal and hate at menstruating (Shah et al. 2015). But the disavowal of menstruation is not the only body image/gendered issue that tomboys experience. In fact, a participant like Alice has a complex relationship with her body and tomboyism. She recounts:

I wasn’t very comfortable with myself also I had a lot of body issues. Being unfeminine was the way to escape from that. After I went to college, I became a little more woke, then became more comfortable with who I am and I actually made friends of all genders . . . I didn’t feel the need to escape so much . . . being a heavy kid and boyish there was a lot of . . . remarks made in school about it by my classmates and my friends. I wanted to be separate from them. I was quite fat for a long time. It is not that I had an eating problem. I just liked to sit in one corner and just read for a very long time. . . . In that sense my parents were worried about me. I don’t think they approached it very well.

Alice’s escape from femininity and her tomboyism appear to be a complex mixture of her body image issues, her weight, her comfort with boys, her love of sports, and her desire to escape the patriarchal restrictions placed on girls. This points to how, while tomboys might aspire to enjoy the privileges of being a boy, it is not their only reason. It also demonstrates the reason why tomboys have difficult relationships with girls or why they consider themselves superior to them. In the same vein, Ray also discusses at length her body image issues and how she was shamed for her looks and clothes by those in school, those in the neighborhood, and her relatives:

In the North [of India] there were comments on how I was dusky . . . I thought I had ugly feet because they are too broad and manly and other girls had dainty feet. Mom said I had the feet of a runner. . . . It wasn’t a very nice time post thirteen years of age. My looks get commented on a lot. I was told I got a moustache like a man. I was like “so what, it is ok.” I was comfortable being a tomboy and on the other hand I was made to feel uncomfortable being a tomboy. . . . My cousin told me to improve the way I dress. [She said,] “We need to do something about the clothes you wear. If you dress like that you will never get a boy in your life.” . . . Things got better in college. [I] got better acceptance.

Here it is clear how Ray was consistently made to feel uncomfortable being a tomboy. While she was shamed for her body and the clothes she wore, she internalized certain notions of feminine beauty and started hating parts of her own body. Like Alice, Ray gained acceptance only in college. She also mentions that during her master’s degree, she did a course on body image, which helped her be comfortable with her own body and accept herself. In both Ray’s and Alice’s narratives, the migration for higher education is a catalyst for them to come to terms with themselves and their bodies.

The transition toward becoming increasingly comfortable in their female bodies through early adulthood is common across all narratives of tomboys in my study. Tara mentions that she was a tomboy between the ages of eleven and fourteen and describes it as a “phase.” She recounts how she went from performing a tomboy identity to a more feminine one and then going back to performing a tomboy identity again in her early twenties. She characterizes these as “phases of experimentation” that were intimately tied to her intercity migrations for work and education. The spaces she occupied during her growing-up years deeply influenced the ways she experienced these phases. Similarly, Alice became more feminine and learned to take care of her skin and deal with her body image issues in college and in her early twenties. Ray first wore a skirt only in her early twenties, and Sivagami wore heels and feminine clothes only when she stayed in a hostel in her early adulthood. She saw the other girls dressing up and wanted to try it out. She explicitly mentions that she stopped being a tomboy at the age of twenty-five because her family was looking to arrange her marriage. For Sivagami, her transition from tomboy to woman was primarily because of her family’s hunt for a groom and their injunctions for her to look feminine. She mentions how she has never seen a tomboyish married woman. As mentioned earlier, Sivagami does state that she enjoyed being a tomboy the most, though she still maintains short hair and even got tonsured once as a married woman.

In all these narratives, we see how the performance of tomboyism may or may not be linked to wearing shorts and boys’ clothes or performing hegemonic masculinity. These narratives also point to the heterogeneity of the tomboy experience and the role that peers and family play in identity formation. Mira, Tara, Alice, Sivagami, Ray, and George, while not entirely embodying a girly-girl existence as adult women, also do not identify as trans men or transgender. They clearly state that they identify as adult women. Their body image issues as tomboys are linked to lookism and, as covered in the next section, to heterosexual desire and romantic relationships.

Tomboys, Body Image, and Heterosexual Desire

While it is well established that lookism is central to romantic relationships (Minerva 2017, 3), there remains a dearth of literature on how lookism among tomboys is different from issues of lookism for those deemed unattractive or not conforming to the prescribed social measures of beauty. I argue in this section that the lookism faced by tomboys questions their womanhood itself. Two of my participants, Tara and Mira, speak of the “costs” of being a tomboy and desiring to be a boy. Mira describes how her “image and personality” did not make her attractive enough to boys. This made her unhappy, and while she did try to prettify herself up a bit, she did not succeed at it since it did not come from within. Mira felt sad that she did not have a boyfriend and could not be like others. Likewise, while growing up Tara constantly questioned herself:

Why does everyone want to be my friend but not a potential romantic partner? Should I feminize myself more, be like other girls who don’t talk, who don’t fight? I had arbitrary crushes, imaginary crushes, on the boy next door, on film stars, on cricketers. I had imaginary partners with whom I was highly sexual in my dreams. My parents would tell me that I moaned in my dreams.

Tara goes on to disclose that by the time she first started dating a boy at the end of the tenth standard, she had already “feminized” herself a great deal. Tara also discusses how she desired both boys and girls when she was growing up but did not speak about any same-sex relationships or the complexities of such relationships while growing up. Similarly, Ray, who also spoke about having a crush on a girl but eventually married a man, revealed how she met her first boyfriend in the twelfth standard:

He preferred girly girls. He gave comments about the way I looked and dressed. He would pit me against another girl who was, according to him, more attractive because she was more girly, who put [on] makeup. I didn’t use makeup. My self-confidence and self-esteem was affected. He broke up with me. I wanted to be the girl he wanted me to be, so I put in effort. I wasn’t comfortable [with] the way I looked.

In Ray’s earlier narrative, she was shamed for her looks and clothes by some peers and relatives. Here, she is also shamed by her boyfriend, which deeply affects her self-esteem and her understanding of her own desirability. Like her earlier quote, she was made to feel uncomfortable in her own body, and she tried to change herself. Similarly, Alice, who explicitly mentions not being attracted to women but only men, talks about how she also tried to change herself: “At that time I remember thinking that maybe I should change myself because I wasn’t sure if the person I was then or the way I acted was conducive to getting someone to like me back. It was for the longest time till I managed to get some confidence in myself.” The pressure of heteronormative coupledom is what leads Alice and Ray to try to bodily change themselves. Familial pressure or shaming at school did not have the same impact on their body image and self-esteem. They were able to resist familial pressure to conform but succumbed to the heteronormative pressures of coupledom.

Hence, one could read the efforts of Ray, Alice, and Tara to feminize themselves as a form of hetero-patriarchal pressure on concepts of desirability where a tomboy eventually grows up to be a pretty, feminine, and heteronormative woman, forgetting her tomboy past. This is a common trope in the cinematic narratives of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Main Hoon Na, where the female protagonists start off as tomboys, experience rejection from the male hero, and months or years later feminize themselves to finally get the attention and romantic love of the hero. While Anjali in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Sanju in Main Hoon Na are able to become feminine, heteronormative women, Alice, Ray, and Tara, despite all their efforts, fail to do so. Their failure to entirely feminize themselves points out how the narrative of hetero-patriarchal pressure to conform is flawed and that there might be tomboys who, despite themselves, fail to become entirely feminine. Ray’s boyfriend’s body shaming and Alice’s and Tara’s internalized notions of sexual desirability do not succeed in entirely feminizing them even though their self-esteem and confidence are deeply affected for a while. It may then be argued that lookism among tomboys not only tries to feminize them but also points to the impossibility of the presence of sexual desire in their lives as heterosexual tomboys.

This failure to find sexual desirability, which, in turn, profoundly affects their body image, leaves many tomboys deeply distraught. Mira and Sivagami, for instance, speak up about this problem in their poignant narratives. Mira notes:

I loved boys—right from the age of eight or nine. In my mind, I liked to be called a boy, be like them, and love them too; all the while inhabiting a girl’s body. But maybe the boys I knew were all conforming to strict gender roles. They seemed to only love girls who performed the role of a girl. And suddenly, the tomboy seemed undesirable. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. But my adolescent self never experienced any gaze of attraction or desire from boys. Why would a boy like another boy in a heteronormative world? This challenge and question structured most of my interactions with boys and men for most of my growing-up and adult life. This was encapsulated by a comment a male friend made to me a few years back: “you were a tomboy; how can you have a boyfriend?”

Mira’s narrative challenges heteronormativity—not from the perspective of queerness, but from within heterosexuality itself. She is a heterosexual girl who enjoys being like a boy but feels comfortable in a girl’s natural body. Desire in a heteronormative world is meant to exist only between women and men, and Mira challenges this heterosexual womanhood itself. She does not want lesbian love or gay love, and she does not want to change her body to become a man. Rather, her tomboyism challenges femininity itself, and hence heterosexual desire. Similarly, Sivagami speaks about the pain of not being desired and of being “friend zoned” by men:

But they would not look at me as a girl. They would look at me only as a friend whom they can talk about other girls, their crushes. It is so painful. And they assumed that you are strong because you are tomboy, a strong person to handle all the pain and emotions; and I would always tell my friend, maybe if I was girly they would have thought before hurting me, rejecting me. If I was a girly girl, they wouldn’t have bluntly said no. I still have a friend, I was interested in him, he used to tell me everything, we used to talk a lot, but he said I can only look at you as a friend. I can tell you anything and everything. That time I used to think, and I used to try to dress up but then I cannot put in so much effort, one day itself is too much, I cannot go through this exercise every single day. It takes time to dress up, to select jewelry, to look like that, I don’t think I want to spend my time on those.

Sivagami’s narrative adds another layer to this challenge to heterosexual desire and norms of female body image. Heterosexual boys are more likely to be best friends with tomboys but cannot experience heterosexual desire for them. This is represented in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Main Hoon Na, where the tomboy and the male hero are best friends but the male hero refuses to see the tomboy as romantically or sexually desirable. The tomboy, representing a form of marginalized femininity, is accorded the space of the friend, the confidante, and the bro. Currently, social media is also invested in understanding tomboys and the tomboy best friend trope. Scoopwhoop (2014) lists “20 signs that you were once a tomboy,” among which the nineteenth point claims, “But life isn’t easy for a Tomboy. We have lost many of our crushes to Overly Womanly Women or have been friend zoned by them because ‘Hey! She’s a bro!’” It is also worth noting that the term “friend zoned,” which is mostly used for men, is used here for tomboys, too.

Predictably, the most painful part in Sivagami’s and Mira’s narratives is the pain of rejection and the impossibility of being ever desired by boys/men. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Main Hoon Na represent the pain that Sivagami and Mira experience. Anjali in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is deeply hurt when she is rejected by Rahul, as is Sanju in Main Hoon Na when she is ignored by Lucky. Apart from being impossible, this desire also seems unspeakable. It is for this reason that Anjali in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai chimes, “Tujhe yaad na meri aye kisi se ab kya kehna” (You don’t remember me, what is the point of speaking about it to anyone) (Johar 1998). Such pain of rejection is also not restricted to adolescence but spills over into adulthood, as seen in Mira’s narrative as well as in the two films discussed here. But Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Main Hoon Na imagine that the resolution to this impossibility of desire lies in transforming the tomboy into a heteronormative feminine or purportedly beautiful woman: a resolution that both Sivagami and Mira resist and often fail to perform. While Sivagami is expected as a tomboy to fail in her wifely and motherly roles, she lives up to the challenge. But that does not feminize her entirely given that her bodily appearance continues to display short hair and she refuses to spend time dressing up. Evidently, then, lookism in relation to tomboys means not just a pressure to become more feminine but also the utter impossibility of finding or experiencing heterosexual male desire itself.

Concluding Remarks

Judith Halberstam (1998), while discussing tomboyism, states that “tomboyism is punished . . . when it threatens to extend beyond childhood into adolescence” (6) and that “it is in the context of female adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodeled into compliant forms of femininity” (6). Furthering Halberstam’s assertions, in this chapter I have tried to establish how tomboyism does extend into adulthood without really obvious threats and that the tomboy instinct need not always be remodeled into “compliant forms of femininity.” My ethnographic data demonstrates how the experiences of tomboys are far more complex than simple formulas of external punishment or compliance. Failure also emerges as a common trope throughout the chapter: the failure of performing emphasized femininity or hegemonic masculinity, and the failure of attaining heterosexual desirability. Lookism therefore intersects with tomboyism to show us how it affects body image while also creating the impossibility for tomboys to attain heterosexual romantic desire.

NOTES

1. Heteronormative desire is based on women, as well as men, performing strict gender roles. As this chapter discusses later, women’s failure to perform normative femininity marks a failure of heteronormative desire as well.

2. Because of COVID-19 and restrictions on travel, the interviews were conducted in English through phone calls and video calls, and some interviews were audio or video recorded with the consent of the participant. Consent forms were obtained from the participants where they have given me written consent to use their quotes in my chapter. The participants—all of them self-identified tomboys—were selected through snowballing, especially through trusted networks, online and offline. Names have been changed to protect their identities, especially in the case of women. In this chapter, they are called Mira, Tara, Alice, George (in this case, the participant preferred to be called George after the character of George/Georgina in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series), Sivagami, and Ray. The reason for selecting English-educated, middle-class participants was the ease of access to them, especially during the pandemic. This choice, however, does not reflect on the relationship between being middle-class and English educated and being affected by negative body image.

3. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is a wildly popular and iconic film directed by Karan Johar. Anjali and Rahul are best friends in college. Anjali has short hair, wears boyish clothes, does not apply makeup, and spends a large part of her time playing basketball with boys. Rahul and Anjali’s friendship is threatened when Tina, a feminine and sexually attractive young woman sporting long hair, short dresses, and full makeup, joins their college. Rahul and Tina fall in love with each other, making Anjali realize that she actually loves Rahul, who only considers her a friend since she is unattractive and tomboyish. Years pass, and Tina dies after giving birth to a baby girl, also named Anjali. In her posthumous letters to her daughter, Tina urges the little Anjali to reunite her father, Rahul, with the adult Anjali. The latter is no longer a tomboy and is seen wearing chiffon saris and sporting long hair and makeup. The little Anjali, with the aid of her grandmother, successfully plots to get her father to fall in love with the adult Anjali. Unlike in their college days, this is not hard for Rahul, since Anjali has now become feminine and attractive. This film has been critiqued for showing that a woman is attractive only if she has long hair and wears feminine clothes, exposing the inherent imbalanced gender dynamics in society (Pathiyath, 2013). Eighteen years after the making of the film, Karan Johar publicly apologized for the transformation of Anjali from a tomboy to a feminine woman in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (The News Minute 2016).

The film Main Hoon Na, directed by Farah Khan, depicts a similar transformation in the college-going tomboy, Sanjana, and how her best friend, Lucky, falls in love with her only when she transforms herself into a feminine woman. Unlike Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, this transformation is not central to the plot of the film, which revolves around an undercover commando, Major Ramprasad Sharma, posing as a college student to protect Sanjana and Lucky, his half-brother. We also notice how Sanjana actively takes a part in her transformation, approaching the feminine and attractive teacher, Miss Chandni, who turns her overnight from a girl wearing torn jeans and a cap into a girl wearing flowing chiffon tunics, with her silky hair flying in the air. This transformation is also reflected in her name. She is earlier referred to as Sanju, and after the transformation, her birth name is reinstated as she apparently becomes whole again to be called Sanjana.

4. George does not seem to make a distinction between butch and tomboy fashion and uses the terms interchangeably. Yet, while growing up, she did not seem to consider butch fashion queer.

5. Kajal is also called kohl, which is a black eye cosmetic worn on the upper and lower waterline of the eyelids.

6. The film Qissa (2013) is a similar and yet drastically different example of a family fulfilling their desire for a son by having their daughter grow up as a boy.

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