Tag Archives: Gender Studies

Delhi University Holds its First Ever Lesbian Film Festival

Delhi University will hosted its first-ever lesbian film festival with around 100 people in attendance. The two-day event has been organised by the Universities Gender Studies Group.

The group is currently working hard to raise awareness regarding women’s sexuality and marginalisation of lesbians.

“We are holding a film festival and calling it a lesbian film festival because of the marginalisation of lesbians in our culture. Women who love women are erased. Same sex culture is dominated by gay men. Women are not given space to be on their own. So, we want to create that space and focus on how to create that space.”

The film festival will showcased, Deepa Mehta’s ‘Fire’ starring Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das.

“We have focused on Indian films because lesbian space is particularly neglected here. We have a range of films from an earlier representation of lesbians in art film Umbartha in 1983 to Fire in 1998, which created a great controversy and inaugurated a lesbian movement in Delhi in the form of CALERI (campaign for lesbian rights).”

Other films shown will be Debalina Majumder’s Ebang Bewarish (…And the Unclaimed) and And You Thought You Knew Me by activist Pramada Menon, Jabbar Patel’s ‘Subah’, and ‘Umbartha’ starring Smita Patil and Girish Karnad.

There was also three works by Kolkata-based filmmaker, Debalina Majumder, were also be featured in the festival.

Another film, ‘Taar Cheye Shey Anek Aaro’ (More than a friend), which looks into the life of four individuals in the background of rising awareness on same-sex relationships. The film also has real-life interviews of people from various sections of society.

16 Things That Only Gender Studies Students Know

  1. Most people think you’re gay, whether you really are or not.
  2. If you are gay, then the fact you are studying this subject “makes a lot of sense” to people.
  3. Most of your friends are gay, bisexual, drag queens or sexual deviants of some other type.
  4. You’ve lost patience with trying to explain to everyone that you don’t identify with a specific gender.
  5. You take feminism to be as real and self-evident as the law of gravity.
  6. You’ll only go out with feminists and wouldn’t even consider someone who didn’t proudly declare themselves a feminist.
  7. You can’t understand why anyone would not call themselves a feminist.
  8. All of your friends and acquaintances are feminists and anyone who isn’t a feminist probably isn’t worth bothering with.
  9. You’re bored of telling people that concepts such as sex and gender are socially-constructed, differ from culture to culture, have altered significantly throughout history and will always be contested and contestable.
  10. You like the phrase ‘socially-constructed’ because you think it makes you sound clever and cool.
  11. You’re looking forward to raising your child – whatever gender it is – the best way you can.
  12. The only way you can respond to stress or insult is by writing an essay about it.
  13. Judith Butler is your closest friend… but also your mortal enemy.
  14. You are one of the few people in the world who understands what performativity is.
  15. Michel Foucault occupies an unhealthily high number of your thoughts.
  16. Even though students on other courses think that all you do is sit around taking the piss out of men, you actually learn so much about politics, philosophy, literature, art and plenty else.