7

Pathologies of “Body Fictions”

A Comparative Study of Margarita with a Straw and Kuch Bheege Alfaaz

SAMRITA SINHA

The Ontology of the Body-Ego as the Locus of Body Image

Bodies are discursively and ideologically produced. They are entangled in a complicated nexus of power, culture, race, class, caste, and gender. Situated within this matrix is female corporeality, which is a semiotic embodiment of a culture’s ideology of the normative and the beautiful. An interrogation of how such normative optics of beauty ordains a standardization of female bodies as an ontological imperative across cultures is the core interest of this chapter. Claudia Liebelt, while examining norms of body image in the introduction to the book Beauty and the Norm: Standardization in Bodily Appearance, claims that “as ideological tools, these standards of somatic normalcy continue not only to describe, but also prescribe human bodies today.”¹ What therefore can be inferred from this sociocultural modality is that body image precedes bodies. Body image is a mandate of preexistent sociocultural ideals and norms that organize a culture’s ways of seeing bodies and consigning their inherent meanings. These organizing ideals are transmitted through a variety of sociocultural apparatuses and are in turn interiorized by subjects, governing paradigms of body satisfaction or dissatisfaction with affective and behavioral corollaries.

Informed by such debates and through the comparative analysis of two recent Hindi films, Kuch Bheege Alfaaz (2018) and Margarita with a Straw (2014), this chapter interrogates the heterosexist and ableist body image construct to probe and complicate the perpetuation of lookism and scopophobia that affects women with deformities or differently abled corporeality. It examines how two women, one with cerebral palsy and the other with a skin disorder, are represented negotiating body norms and responding to their divergence from normative body aesthetics. Whereas Archana, the central female protagonist in Kuch Bheege Alfaaz, has leukoderma, Laila in Marga­rita with a Straw is a queer young woman with cerebral palsy. The focus hinges on a comparison of how the corporeal nonnormativity of both the female protagonists affects their interiorized self-images.

Undeniably, beyond the social, political, and cultural modalities of the body are its psychical dimensions. There are two important paradigms to understanding the hermeneutics of the body—the sociocultural and the psychical. Within the domain of psychoanalysis, the ontology of the body is an important pathway to understanding the psychic dimensions of a subject. Elucidated by Freud, the body as a starting point of mental functioning is at the core of the development of the ego. And as Freud himself famously put it, the ego is “first and foremost a body-ego; it is not merely a surface entity but it is itself the projection of a surface.”² Resonating Freud’s thoughts that the body-self is the predominant foundation for any coherent sense of the self, Lacan tells us that “we are beings who are looked at in the spectacle of the world.”³ What is interesting for us is to understand how the body image construct functions as the Lacanian “master signifier” residing within the socially shared space of the Symbolic register, which is the unconscious repertoire of the multiple available tools of articulation for a subject. Within this matrix of signifiers shared among collective humanity, we see how socially coded messages gain signification in the shaping of subjectivities. The predominant thrust of the Lacanian and Freudian psychical understanding of the role of body schema in a subject’s ontological universe is the concept that “we are beings-in-a-body and we are the subject of the other’s gaze.”⁴ This idea of an embodied self and the “looked-at-ness”⁵ of the body, along with its culturally mandated visual aesthetics, presents to us the challenge of integrating the meaning of our corporeality into our sense of who we are. In summation, the realization that the self gains cogency in relation to how the body is perceived by others is at the core of how body image can be a hegemonic vector of control in any given culture.

Pathologies of Body Fictions and the Production of Body Image in Women with Deformities/Disabilities

Principally aligned with iterations about the controlling modalities of body image in a given culture, the analysis of Kuch Bheege Alfaaz, directed by Onir, and Margarita with a Straw, directed by Shonali Bose, engages here with the biopolitics of body image that informs the ontological frontiers of women with disabilities. In all cultures and subcultures, dominant ideological apparatuses such as the media and mass communication disseminate information about the meanings of human appearance. Culturally coded messages transmit acceptable standards, norms, and expectations about appearance—what traits of physical characteristics and appearance are and are not socially deigned and what it means to possess or lack these socially celebrated characteristics. The genesis of this concept can be traced back to the late twentieth century and the beginning of global neoliberalism, as propounded in the works of Susan Bordo and Naomi Wolf. In The Beauty Myth, Wolf claims, “In assigning value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it is an expression of power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.”⁶ Such power relations are embodied in the fact that in a neoliberal consumerist era, the machinery of the beauty and cosmetics industry runs on a fetishization of impossible body ideals with women as the predominant target.

The interrelatedness of beauty ideals and its normative imperatives thus is a historical process of ordering and preordaining bodies into binary categories of desirable and undesirable, claims Bonnie Berry in her compelling book titled Beauty Bias: Discrimination and Social Power. Berry argues, “With workplace experience, for example, we see the double standards imposed on women for their appearance that are not similarly imposed on men, in addition to the obvious cases of looks-based discrimination against the not-so-young, the non-white, and the disabled.”⁷ In a technologically sustained, hyperconsumerist neoliberal world, the female body has therefore emerged as a site of visual consumption, which leads to an inordinate desire for body modification often premised on perceived notions of body flaws.⁸ Furthermore, implied in Bonnie Berry’s comment is an important idea that women with disabilities are situated within a complex biopolitical assemblage of other oppressive identity markers such as class, caste, gender, race, and heteronormative body image. The perceived deviation from culturally mandated body aesthetics therefore results in the viewing of women with deformities or disabilities as perpetually dwelling within fractured and fragmented body-selves as they are labeled as women who are “defects and undesirable,”⁹ as well as beings who are asexual, unfeminine, and infantile.¹⁰

In the context of Debra Walker King’s notion of “body-fictions,” underneath the polysemic layers of culturally constituted specular and fictive body images, “the ‘authentic’ self gets silenced and lost,”¹¹ and the body myths of women with physical disabilities are fictively construed as “grotesque spectacle” or “icon of deviance.”¹² Further, Susan Wendell tells us that in a culture that equates ableism with body autonomy and control over one’s body, a disability “symbolizes failure” and manifests a body image that able-bodied individuals “are trying to avoid, forget, and ignore.”¹³ In fact, the monolithic sociocultural lexicon of the ideal body image is predicated on ideals and fantasies of youth, slenderness, height, nondisability, and a certain racial primacy.¹⁴ In this context, as a complex assemblage of corporeal, psychical, and social mechanisms, a heteronormative body image construct is a cultural fictionalization of the female body. And this body fiction is a veritable phenomenon of desubjectification of women with deformed/disabled bodies.

The negotiations that women with bodily anomalies make with normative body image discourses need to be further examined within significant epistemological transitions within contemporary optics on disability, not only globally but also in India. That said, it is important to note that there has been a major dissonance among activists, scholars, and persons with disabilities in terms of the remedial social model for the differently abled. The remedial social modality has a circumscribed vision of inclusivity of persons with physical impairment and focuses rather narrowly on their limitations rather than their strengths toward the removal of social barriers in a society ruled by nondisabled persons.¹⁵ This modality has arguably further perpetuated negative body aesthetics for women with body anomalies or disabilities.

From such a commiserative stance—that of a social patronage and decentering of the body within the discourse of disability—several contemporary scholars have recentered the body within the rhetoric of disability, locating in it an epistemological value. In this context, scholars like H-Dirkson L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, in a sharp retort to medicalized ideas like “hearing loss,” have postulated not oppositional but differential epistemes to the problem that they call “deaf gain.”¹⁶ Likewise, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has conceptualized notions such as “disability gain” to postulate that the very phenomenology of disability should be reframed as a source of gain, rather than a loss, situated in the demand that disability integration be deemed as a resource gain instead of a resource drain.¹⁷ While this approach unsettles, and indeed questions, the social reductionism and devaluation of “disability,” it also raises a number of debatable issues around the representational regimes that run the risk of degenerating into a commodification of “disabled” bodies while attempting to represent alternate forms of female embodiment or “alternative beauty.”¹⁸ It is through the prism of such a political debate that this chapter interrogates the representational regimes of Bollywood in configuring the body perception of women with deformities or disabilities and posits a need for differential optics toward fostering affirmative and alternative modalities of body positivity of women with nonnormative bodies.

The Normalization of Scopophobia in Kuch Bheege Alfaaz

For women with physical impairments, it is their body deficit that becomes a defining parameter of their constitutive selfhood, often leading others to completely ignore their possession of a variety of personal qualities.¹⁹ As a result, the body image of impairment takes over as a predominant paradigm of identity that invisibilizes the other human attributes of the person with a disability. This narrow focus on the limitedness of their functional body is predicated on the stigma-based medical model, which in turn shapes social or identity politics and then reinforces, in a negative way, the notion that bodies of women with disabilities are different.²⁰ Consequently, women with physical deformities internalize profound anxieties of body dysmorphia and suffer a sense of dissonance from the cultural expectations of appearance aesthetics.²¹ This internalized discordance resulting from culture’s pejorative reactions to their “anomalous” bodies leads such women to believe that their bodies are a “source of pain, guilt, and embarrassment.”²² Such negative self-images “perpetuate feelings of inferiority, a poor body self-concept, and avoidance of social interactions,”²³ further normalizing scopophobia as an integral part of the ontological negotiations of women with impairments.

The postulations about scopophobia in Onir’s Kuch Bheege Alfaaz can be reconfigured with the help of the current debates within disability discourses on the praxis of staring, which in turn animates social connection. It is worth turning here to Sarah Böllinger’s essay titled “Broken Beauty, Broken Cups: Disabled Bodies in Contemporary African Art,” where she argues that “what we can learn from those being stared at is the following: the visibility of their non-normate bodies in public space is of immense importance because society will learn to see and think differently only by being confronted with them, whether this concerns human bodies or artworks.”²⁴ In the parlance of contemporary disability studies, the praxis of staring is predicated on a learning process that gains impetus from the idea of “disability gain.”²⁵ Only if nonnormative bodies did not give way to scopophobia and did not let themselves be dehumanized by the act of being stared at would society be sensitized and learn to include alternate corporealities. According to such a reading, the act of staring is dialogic and carries an immense epistemological potential to foster affirmative and inclusive meanings about alternate and nonnormative bodies. In other words, staring does not necessarily ascribe a victim status to those being stared at; rather, it produces identities in a social matrix.²⁶ Although such a reading does possess merit, it once again deflects the social and moral onus on nonnormate subjects to shake off scopophobia and engage with a subject position of stared-at-ness in an idealistic manner. Such a reading is precariously premised on a hopeful conjecture of what staring at nonnormate bodies should ideally produce rather than examining the etiological ableist invasive politics of staring. Not all praxis of staring is located in an atmosphere of conviviality and hence scopophobia can be fueled by the hostility of a deeply divisive society toward non-normative bodies. However, Böllinger’s reading of the politics of staring should provide a significant alternative pathway if representational apparatuses such as the media begin with fostering a positivist and convivial episteme of staring as a differential modality of learning about persons with disabilities that is meant to forge a culture of body positivity.

In Onir’s Kuch Bheege Alfaaz, Archana, who is known as Archie, has internalized scopophobia as a result of disparaging reactions she faces toward her skin condition, leukoderma, and because of which she wears a scarf that helps with stigma management. We know that within body image discourse on women with physical deformities, social withdrawal is perceived as a tool of stigma management.²⁷ In Kuch Bheege Alfaaz, we find a strong undercurrent of such disempowering recourses for stigma management as Archana is never seen in socially fostering homosocial company or other alternate social spaces of self-pursuit. And yet, Onir’s film is predominantly a love story revolving around Archana’s pursuit of ideal love. It is this concatenation of an ideal love, the teleology of existence, and female body image that is at the core of the politics of representation in Kuch Bheege Alfaaz. Within the Indian context, it is interesting to note that Bollywood often projects the idea of romantic love as a social reward for women. This ideal of love as a social aspiration therefore is synonymous with the pursuit of ideal body appearance for women in a culture besotted with lookism. In the film, the paradigms of body image are deeply rooted in the female protagonist’s pursuit of self-validation through ideal love, defined as a transcendental signified that looks beyond the vagaries of leukodermic patchy skin and superficial beauty. The very sensibility of Onir’s film is heavily inclined toward a commiserative patronizing love through which the female protagonist realizes her femininity. In the Indian context, according to Nandini Ghosh, the female fashioning of body appearance is dialectically related to the patriarchally ascribed functionality of the female body. Given the importance of fulfilling the ultimate role of motherhood, female body concepts are transactionally channelized toward fashioning its sexual desirability.²⁸ The pursuit of love for Archie can therefore be located in this intersection of body anomaly, femininity, and sexuality.

The film opens with a portrayal of the nightscape of the city of Calcutta, when the promise of magical love and its corollary of an exciting life literally hang in the air, with R. J. Alfaaz’s seductive voice kick-starting the popular radio show Kuch Bheege Alfaaz while belting out old Hindi Bollywood love songs. Archie is shown traveling in a cab to meet her blind date, set up through her Tinder account, and feels spiritually ennobled by the words of Alfaaz and the songs he plays, which the cab driver tunes into as he drives Archie to her destination. Although it is nighttime, Archie is seen wearing heavy, dark sunglasses, and her head and face are covered up with a scarf. A closer look at Archie gives the viewers hints of white patches around her mouth and eyes. Throughout the movie, Archie is seen wearing her dark sunglasses, and her head is wrapped in a scarf while negotiating public spaces, which normalizes scopophobia around skin disorders, the visibility of which can be controlled by those afflicted by them. This is because the devices of stigma management among women with physical impairments and who negotiate body image ideals primarily depend on the degree of the visibility of their own stigmatic attribute to others. Hence, devices of stigma management for Archie become her “scarf” and the “dark glares.” Moreover, it is only the right side of her face that is shown as affected by leukodermic patches, while the left side is clear, and it is mostly her leukodermic profile that the camera focuses on, which in turn becomes a reminder that for women with disfigurements or disabilities, it is their body disorder that is a dominant lens through which their subjectivities are defined and represented.

There is a representational discrepancy in Onir’s film, however. On the one hand, Archie is depicted as an independent and feisty young woman who is both self-assured and self-sufficient, and on the other hand, she uses her stigma management tools as her social crutches. She has a moderately successful career as a meme artist, and creativity becomes a pathway for her self-definition. However, there is a pensive aura about Archie as she reflects on love, friendship, and her self-image. Underlying Archie’s self-assured exterior disposition, therefore, is a strong element of social isolation because, apart from her coworker and admirer, Apu, she is not seen sharing other social spaces of self-pursuit either through homosocial relations or other relations. The only other close relation is her boisterous, confident, and caring mother, Aruna Pradhan. In fact, the very sociality of Archie’s public and social spheres is characterized by her work life and going on blind dates, where one experience after the other leaves her feeling more and more melancholic as she is affected by the look of disappointment on her dates’ faces when the realization of her skin condition dawns on them. In due time, however, it is apparent that Archie has come to terms with her suitors’ perplexity, as she begins to remove her sunglasses and scarf while talking to them. She even begins to enjoy these moments where she agentively controls the situation by being the surprise factor herself—on the first blind date in the film’s opening, Archie good-humoredly asks her dumbfounded date, “Kya hua? Zaada Khubsurat nikli Kya?” (What happened? Did I turn out to be more beautiful than you expected?).²⁹ Her words here are a testimony to the fact that for women, love and social acceptance are deeply located in their body aesthetics and appearance.

Although a contrarian interpretation of Kuch Bheege Alfaaz could be that it problematizes the pursuit of love as an ableist endeavor, by projecting a woman with leukoderma’s legitimate claim to it, the contrived manner in which this love is pursued in the film nullifies the validity of such a reading. In fact, in a poignant moment, Archie is seen checking her reflection in the mirror with a wistful and pensive air. This is understandable because in a later scene, where Archie is sitting in a café with Apu, he catches an old man staring at her and in a protective impulse shifts his chair around to block the man’s view of her. Archie takes offence at this patronizingly chivalrous behavior and tells Apu that she can handle such situations. Contradictorily, such fleeting moments of Archie’s self-assurance are paralleled with an underlying scopophobia owing to which she continuously covers herself up to negotiate with the stigmatic male gaze in public spaces. As the film unfolds, Archie, who is already in love with the disembodied voice and romantic seductions of Alfaaz’s persona, serendipitously gets connected with Alfaaz while dialing a date who stood her up. We note that Alfaaz, too, has a conflicted past—while still in high school, in his teenage years, his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Chavi, had committed suicide after discovering she was pregnant by him.

While Archie is depicted as a conflicted and tormented soul carrying the burden of social stigma, Alfaaz is depicted as a man haunted by his failure to have taken accountability for Chavi’s pregnancy and later her death. As a WhatsApp meme creator, Archie is an anonymous creative artist, and she revels in her social anonymity—she also chooses dates who, like her, do not have a profile display picture on their Tinder accounts. By representing Archie’s disembodied anonymity both in her workplace and her personal love life (she carries on a telephonic romance with Alfaaz), as a matter of preference and revelry, Onir’s film glorifies and valorizes a life of social invisibility as one with ontological value for conflicted individuals like Archie who carry around burdens of internalized social stigma of body appearance.

We further learn of Archie’s angsts in a revelatory scene where she is seen recounting to Alfaaz how developing leukoderma changed her life; she claims, “I was like any other girl. Apparently, I was the chosen one.”³⁰ What Archie experiences here has been corroborated by Lennard Davis in his take on disability as a retributory corollary of some vague moral aberration in a previous sinful birth.³¹ Hence, Archie tells Alfaaz that in her adolescent years, her friends had played a very cruel prank on her when they had set her up on a blind date with a handsome guy from her class and one look at her patchy face had made him turn and run away because he was expecting a beautiful girl. This incident of bullying foregrounds a socially discriminatory attitude toward women with body deformities. In response, Alfaaz tells her that someday somebody will love her for her inner beauty.

Given that Kuch Bheege Alfaaz predominantly projects the pursuit of ideal love as a female quest, it ends up normalizing romantic love as a self-evaluative social mandate for a woman who is leukodermic. This is not to presumptuously claim that the quest for love by the female protagonist makes her appear weak and helpless. Instead, the problematics of Archie’s pursuit of love lies in its depiction as a single-minded transcendental quest that is indifferent toward any alternate spaces for self-actualization. The film never emphatically establishes Archie’s indefatigable social prowess and her ability to transcend body dysmorphia in claiming social spaces. We never see Archie having any open conversation about her acceptance of leukoderma in the film except at the point where she confesses to an interiorization of the social stigma around leukoderma to Alfaaz. The film celebrates a certain kind of solitariness in which it situates its female protagonist with leukoderma as well as its guilt-ridden male protagonist, perpetuating and normalizing social isolation and seclusion as the archetypal context for such conflicted subjectivities as Archie’s and Alfaaz’s. This commiserative love toward Archie is therefore borne out of Alfaaz’s interiorized guilt over his treatment of Chavi and problematically becomes the source of self-fulfillment for Archie.

In interviews, Onir has claimed that Kuch Bheege Alfaaz is about falling in love through a discovery of “inner beauty,”³² an idea that Alfaaz proclaims before Archie. Such an assertion problematically presupposes that the image of Archie’s scarred face is a site of alterity and does not live up to the normative standards of an ideal body image. This reductive and problematically utopic ideology of “inner beauty” desubjectivizes women with nonnormative bodies, subordinating them to an evaluative control of the body image ideal. In the contemporary culture of lookism, which stresses the visibility and tangibility of female corporeality, such abstracted platitudes of “inner beauty” further foreground the lack in that female corporeal frame that must be compensated and/or substituted by ideas of mythic and mystifying notions of inner beauty.

To sum up, the present reading of Onir’s film is theoretically affiliated to the contemporary debate in intersectional disability studies, where the presence of “extraordinary bodies”³³ in the new beautyscape of global fashion has been complicated by the idea of a commodification of disability. It draws upon the fact that the inclusion of models with disabilities in the newly emerging topography of capitalist media as well as the global beauty and fashion industry, might not always be about representation of “alternative beauty”³⁴ since such representational regimes may only end up reinforcing ableist stereotypes of body normativity. Fox, Krings, and Vierke, in a powerful commentary on this phenomenon, claims that a deformed or “disabled body is perfectly able to portray an ableist image if inserted into visual rhetorics that don’t challenge conventional stereotypes.”³⁵ In this sense, Archie’s representation as a mystified embodiment of “inner beauty” achieving fulfillment through commiserative love is an ableist consignment of meaning onto her physical alterity as a person with leukoderma, which in turn runs the risk of “disability avoidance.”³⁶

Toward a Positivist Lexicon of Body Aesthetics in Margarita with a Straw

Body image norms are particularly confining for women with physical disabilities because they concretize the heterosexist imaginary that women with disabilities are not impacted by body ideals as their bodies are already always interpellated within the ideology of body deviance.³⁷ What particularly complicates the situation is that in the case of those who use accommodating devices such as wheelchairs, braces, or crutches, women with disabilities are described as “metal . . . hard, cold, angular, and usually ugly”³⁸ because they are perceived as deviating from normative expectations of appearance ideals. However, Nandini Ghosh tells us that the use of mobility aids is not imbricated with beauty aids but is mobility empowering for women with disability. Disabled women learn to negotiate with these machinic devices as an integral aspect of their body selves. According to Ghosh’s ethnographic research in rural Bengal, women with locomotor disabilities are also known to use mobility aids toward a performance of normative femininity to attain a feminine gait, for instance, and to walk straight with the aid of calipers. However, we also know that owing to the hegemony of body image ideals, social encounters of women with physical disabilities are fraught with a perceived compulsion toward concealment of their stigmatized disability aids.³⁹

In Shonali Bose’s Margarita with a Straw,⁴⁰ this disability conundrum is highlighted in the initial scenes of the film when Laila, the lead character as a wheelchair user with cerebral palsy, is seen engineering her body appearance on social media by cropping her picture from the waist down, attempting to invisibilize her twisted legs and the fact that she is a wheelchair user. It is worth remembering here that unlike Archie in Kuch Bheege Alfaaz, Laila is represented as comfortably steering multiple social relations as she is an active member of a band and has multiple friends who accept her for her talent as a musician. However, there is a gradual transition in Laila as she accepts her wheelchair as radically coterminous with her bodied self. The wheelchair comes to be an important device: a metaphoric locomotive mediating freedom and a tool of Laila’s individuation as she is seen negotiating cultural topographies in her wheelchair. Laila’s wheelchair radically counters the cultural imaginary that perceives wheelchair users as “wheelchair bound.” In this regard, Ann Fox, Krings, and Vierke tell us that “news outlets regularly use language like ‘wheelchair bound’ to describe wheelchair users when in fact wheelchairs are a device for movement, freedom, and energy conservation for disabled people.”⁴¹ Nandini Ghosh’s study likewise elaborates that for disabled women, “mobility aids are attuned to not only the needs of their disability but also to the notions of femininity internalized through the processes of socialization.”⁴² In the light of this—and in the Indian context, especially within an underprivileged scenario—there is a greater burden on women with disabilities to orchestrate their mobility aids toward the performance of femininity for social acceptance. Therefore, as devices of individuation for Indian women with disabilities, mobility aids are socially engineered under the constraint of patriarchal sanction.

In the first half of Margarita with a Straw, we see Laila struggling at every step to negotiate with an ableist optics of body morphology mediated through other characters, such as Dhruv, her fellow classmate in Delhi University and also a person with disability. At one instance in the cafeteria, Dhruv is seen ogling another girl’s bare midriff, though he claims to Laila jocularly that he would still marry only her. This particular scene establishes the normative body as a sexual body and the body concept of a person with a disability as nonsexual. Hereafter, as Laila tries to explore her sexual awakening, she also explores with the bodily articulations of sexual desire. One day she kisses Dhruv in the university and later musters the courage to declare her love for Nima, the lead singer of the college band for which Laila writes songs. Dhruv, however, takes offense to this and tells her, “Tumhe kya lagta hai? Tum normal logon ke saath rehkar normal ban jayogi?” (What do you think? By mixing with normal people you would become normal?)⁴³—manifesting the societal view that Laila’s disability is the locus of her body concept, which in turn decimates her social and sexual worth.

With time, Laila secures admission in New York University and moves to the United States with her mother. There she meets Khanum, a Pakistani-Bangladeshi lesbian girl with a visual impairment who completely overhauls Laila’s interiorized negative body image and her quest for love. Unlike Laila’s conservative perceptions of her own body image, Khanum has a far more positive body optics. She is seen negotiating public spaces in a very self-assured and confident manner. She is also the first person who emphatically tells Laila that she is very beautiful. More importantly, Khanum’s touch and her sensual enunciations to Laila about her beautiful body-self establish a significant alternate discourse where a person with disability is enfolded within the lexicon of the body beautiful, an aporic frontier from which persons with disability have been systemically eliminated and alienated. This, as Tobin Siebers states, proves that the hegemonic idea of beauty is integrally congruous with the idea of harmony and wholeness and that standardized beauty is always mediated through uniformity.⁴⁴

Khanum’s sexual touch redirects Laila toward an awakening of sensuous pleasures for her own disabled body and an affirmative body aesthetics. Here, as a stroke of feminist strategy, Shonali Bose’s film—by making a lesbian woman with a visual impairment the dissenting voice of alternate body image—further destabilizes the heterosexist entitlement to ordering the cultural perceptions of body aesthetics of women with disabilities. And it crafts the symbiotic relation between body image and female sexuality. Khanum takes Laila to all those social spaces that are culturally heterosexist, navigating such spatialities with a greater sense of body autonomy and sexual agency. The film deliberately represents Khanum as a profoundly sexualized being only to establish that her body aesthetics is not governed by her visual impairment, and neither is her sexual worth adjudicated by it. Ideal body image, which generally operates as the Lacanian “master signifier,” is debunked here, and other signifiers, such as the moral and social worth associated with body image and resulting in a woman’s sexual worth under normative ableist body image discourses, are deconstructed.

Although the application of beauty products generates conflicting arguments within body image studies, in Margarita with a Straw, the application of makeup and the use of beauty products are projected as an innocuous self-indulgence, a matter of choice and empowerment, and a way to debunk the misnomer that only able-bodied women with normative bodies can possibly use beauty products. Bonnie Berry, for example, in The Power of Looks: Social Stratification of Physical Appearance, claims that there is a difference between the use of cosmetics and that of cosmeceuticals (that bring about more permanent body alterations). Though cosmetics and cosmeceuticals are used for the purposes of attaining social power through cosmetically altered body appearance, the use of cosmeceuticals, unlike cosmetics, portends a kind of obsession with a more permanent nature of body alteration that might foreground body dysmorphia and a more perpetual dissatisfaction with one’s body appearance.⁴⁵

Laila’s pursuit of beauty in such a context can be interpreted as mediating a particular visual politics, where the visual field of a heteronormative culture only admits beautified and cosmetically enhanced normative female bodies already always inscribed within the paradigms of acceptable and permissible beauty. In the context of Margarita with a Straw, therefore, the application of makeup by Khanum and later Laila is not contiguous with the male gaze or the anxieties of lookism. The scene where the audience sees Khanum applying eye shadow and teaching Laila to apply makeup establishes that women with disabilities can have legitimate recourses to claiming their choice to use makeup while negotiating public spaces and social spheres without obsessing with beauty labor. Here, it is Khanum who makes this choice available to Laila.

A certain fulfillment with her “self” at the end of the film, as Laila goes on a date with herself, shows her transcendence over all dependency on the self-evaluative forces of either love or sexual relations while she comes to terms with her nonnormative body image. The film’s closure significantly reinforces the self-contentment of a more evolved and empowered Laila reveling in her aloneness borne out of choice and not compulsory isolation. Her agentive reclamation of her body image and its positive hermeneutics are elucidated through the closing scenes as Laila visits a beauty parlor for a ritualistic body-self makeover and tells her friend over the phone that she cannot go out for a movie as she has a date that night. The scene in the beauty salon is a significant intervention in establishing the semantics of beauty labor as not an exclusivist ableist pursuit but to foster the visibility of persons with disabilities in such spaces that have historically been marked by the hypervisibility of only able-bodied women toward a patriarchally legitimated pursuit of beauty. Laila’s entry into the beauty parlor is predicated on the idea of the “democratization of beauty.”⁴⁶

Furthermore, through the scene in the beauty salon, the film first creates an expectation in the audience that Laila’s beauty rituals and her impending date are suggestive of her moving on—perhaps with a new heteronormative relationship after her mother’s death and the leaving of Khanum, her lesbian lover. However, such hetero-patriarchal audience expectations are shattered at the end by the mirror scene, in which, while sipping on margarita with a straw, Laila looks at her beautified image in the large mirror hanging opposite and smiles jubilantly, raising a toast to herself. This closing mirror scene is a sharp retort to the hegemonic sociocultural contiguity between the female pursuit of beauty and the pursuit of heteronormative love by replacing it with Laila’s self-love, which happens to be with her nonnormate bodied self. This scene, where we see an exuberant, prettified Laila sipping a margarita with a straw on a date with herself, upholds the concept of “alternative beauty,”⁴⁷ which does not commodify disability, but rather foregrounds a differential aesthetics of body image within the paradigms of media’s representation of disability. The agential reclamation of life and its vagaries is thus mediated through a positivist alteration of body concept with this closing mirror scene.

It is not to say that the ending of Margarita with a Straw celebrates a kind of a separatist female utopia, and neither is aloneness being romanticized; in fact, the film makes evident the social needs and the material reality of Laila as a person with a disability. The ending is instead an acknowledgment of the fact that beyond all social spaces exists a spatial ontology of selfhood contiguous with Laila’s transition toward body positivity and the film’s expansion of the frontiers of human beauty. Laila’s transition toward a more coherent internal world, predicated on a consolidated ontology of positive body image, finally enforces an empathetic and sensitive representation where the female protagonist with a disability is not ascribed a perpetual existence of victimhood after the loss of her mother and her lover. The closing scene concretizes the apposite titular implication that sipping a margarita with a straw is not an act of infantile preoccupation for a woman with cerebral palsy but a plea for integration of differential subjectivities with all their nonunitarian body aesthetics.

In conclusion, this chapter sums up the complexities of body image of women with deformities or disabilities, keeping in mind neoliberal India’s construction of femininity. Given the nation’s patriarchal optics of the functionality of the female body, which is mediated through its reproductive role, body image becomes the mechanism through which the female body is expected to fashion its femininity and sexual desirability. This chapter notes how Kuch Bheege Alfaaz posits the submission of the female protagonist to this contrived ideal of body image—where the pursuit of love is imbricated with internalized anxieties about a perceived failure to fulfill reproductive imperatives because of the lack of sexual desirability of a woman with leukoderma. In contrast, Margarita with a Straw decouples the pursuit of selfhood from such heteronormatively instrumented body ontology and subverts hegemonic body ideals that normalize ableist semantics of body aesthetics. Hence, whereas, in Shonali Bose’s radical film, Laila works toward positive and agentive lexicons of self-articulation that dismantle culturally manufactured pathologies of body fictions around disability, in Onir’s film, the female lead is represented as negotiating scopophobia and lookism in a more hetero-patriarchally sanctioned manner that perpetuates the myth of social worthlessness, moral failure, and body dysmorphia around body deformity, rather than debunking it. A comparative reading of both films then becomes important because they address the issue of female body image among women with deformities or disabilities in neoliberal India, which, despite the rhetoric of freedom and choice, largely submits to collusive politics of prescriptive body aesthetics.

NOTES

1. Liebelt, Böllinger, and Verke, Beauty and the Norm, 21.

2. Freud, The Standard Edition, 26–30.

3. Lacan, Ecrits, 81.

4. Lemma, Under the Skin, 18–20.

5. Lemma, Under the Skin, 18–20.

6. Wolf, The Beauty Myth, 3–10.

7. Berry, Beauty Bias, 10.

8. Lemma, Under the Skin, 15–20.

9. Begum, “Disabled Women,” 77.

10. Healey, “The Common Agenda.”

11. King, introduction to Body Politics.

12. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 285.

13. Wendell, “Toward a Feminist Theory,” 268–269.

14. Cash and Smolak, Body Image, 3–9.

15. Ghosh, Interrogating Disability, 10–16.

16. Bauman and Murray, Deaf Gain, 1–10.

17. Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability.”

18. Liebelt, “Beauty and the Norm,” 27.

19. Asch and Fine, “Nurturance, Sexuality.”

20. Darling, “Stigma of Disability.”

21. Wendell, The Rejected Body.

22. Begum, “Disabled Women.”

23. Smart, Disability, Society, and the Individual, 25.

24. Böllinger, “Broken Beauty,” 159.

25. Garland-Thomson, Staring, 1–10.

26. Böllinger, “Broken Beauty,” 159–160.

27. Taub, Fanklik, and McLorg, “Body Image among Women.”

28. Ghosh, Interrogating Disability, 142–145.

29. Onir, Kuch Bheege Alfaaz.

30. Onir, Kuch Bheege Alfaaz.

31. Davis, The Disability Studies Reader, 2–10.

32. Onir, Kuch Bheege Alfaaz.

33. Fox, Krings, and Vierke, “Disability Gain.”

34. Fox, Krings, and Vierke, 105.

35. Fox, Krings, and Vierke, 107.

36. Fox, Krings, and Vierke, 118.

37. Cash and Smolak, Body Image, 3–10.

38. Bogle and Shaul, “Body Image,” 93.

39. Ghosh, Interrogating Disability, 140–142.

40. Bose, Margarita with a Straw.

41. Fox, Krings, and Vierke, “Disability,” 118.

42. Ghosh, Interrogating Disability, 141.

43. Bose, Margarita with a Straw.

44. Siebers, “Disability Aesthetics.”

45. Berry, The Power of Looks, 63–65.

46. Berry, 68.

47. Fox, Krings, and Vierke, “Disability Gain,” 120.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asch, Adrienne, and Michelle Fine. “Nurturance, Sexuality and Women with Disabilities: The Example of Women and Literature.” In The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis, 241–259. London: Routledge, 1997.

Bauman, H-Dirksen L., and Joseph J. Murray. Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Begum, Nasa. “Disabled Women and the Feminist Agenda.” Feminist Review 40, no. 1 (1992): 70–80.

Berry, Bonnie. Beauty Bias: Discrimination and Social Power. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.

———. The Power of Looks: Social Stratification of Physical Appearance. London: Ashgate, 2008.

Bogle, Jane Elder, and Susan L. Shaul. “Body Image and the Woman with a Disability.” In Sexuality and Physical Disability: Personal Perspectives, edited by David G. Bullard and Susan E. Knight, 91–95. St. Louis, MO: Mosby Press, 1981.

Böllinger, Sarah. “Broken Beauty, Broken Cups: Disabled Bodies in Contemporary African Art.” In Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance, edited by Claudia Liebelt, Sarah Böllinger, and Ulf Vierke, 127–154. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Bose, Shonali, dir. Margarita with a Straw. (Viacom18 Motion Pictures, Mumbai, 2014).

Cash, Thomas F., and Linda Smolak, eds. Body Image: A Handbook of Science, Practice, and Prevention. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2011.

Darling, Rosalyn Benjamin. “Stigma of Disability.” In Encyclopaedia of Criminology and Deviant Behaviour, edited by Clifton D. Bryant, 482–485. London: Routledge, 2001.

Davis, Lennard J. The Disability Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1997.

Fox, Ann M., Matthias Krings, and Ulf Vierke. “‘Disability Gain’ and the Limits of Representing Alternative Beauty.” In Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance, edited by Claudia Liebelt, Sarah Böllinger, and Ulf Vierke, 105–109. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychoanalytical Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1923.

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

———. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal 14, no. 3 (2002): 1–32.

———. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Ghosh, Nandini. Interrogating Disability in India: Theory and Practice. New Delhi: Springer, 2016.

Healey, Shevy. “The Common Agenda between Old Women, Women with Disability and All Women.” Women and Therapy 14, no. 3–4 (1993): 65–77.

King, Debra Walker. Introduction to Body Politics and the Fictional Double, edited by Debra Walker King, 10–20. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. 1st complete ed. in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.

Lemma, Alessandra. Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification. London: Routledge, 2010.

Liebelt, Claudia. “Beauty and the Norm: An Introduction,” in Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance, edited by Claudia Liebelt, Sarah Böllinger, and Ulf Verke (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Liebelt, Claudia, Sarah Böllinger, and Ulf Vierke. Beauty and the Norm: Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Onir, dir. Kuch Bheege Alfaaz. (Yoodlee Films, Mumbai, 2018).

Siebers, Tobin. “Disability Aesthetics and the Body Beautiful: Signposts in the History of Art.” ALTER—European Journal for Disability Studies 2, no. 4 (2008): 329–336.

Smart, Julie. Disability, Society, and the Individual. Gaithersburg, MD: Aspen, 2001.

Taub, Diane E., Patricia L. Fanklik, and Penelope A. McLorg. “Body Image among Women with Physical Disabilities: Internalization of Norms and Reactions to Nonconformity.” Sociological Focus 36, no. 2 (2012): 159–176.

Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. London: Routledge, 1996.

———. “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” in The Disability Studies Reader, edited by Lennard J. Davis (London: Routledge, 1997).

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women. New York: William Morrow, 1991.