That picture puts me in mind of Farzana Doctor's novel Stealing Nasreen, which is about Gujarati-Canadians; one of the characters has an antique miniature painting from home of a rani and her maid-servant, who are implied (much more subtly) to have an erotic connection. (The book suggests that the figures in the painting are sentient and commenting on the action, willing one of the characters to come out as a lesbian; on the other hand the whispers she hears might be a psychological projection, but I would vote for option one.)
As far as reference books go, I would recommend checking out some of Ruth Vanita's edited collections; she has several about the representations of same-sex desire in India that have very good historic (including ancient and medieval) sources. (This is just a guess, as the drawing style seems very South Asian to me, but I bet it's a lot more specific in terms of region and time period, and I could be wrong.) I've heard her speak and I think she's very smart; I believe her work nicely deconstructs the whole Foucault "homosexuality was invented in the West in the 19th c" argument, which I have minimal patience for, with a lot of evidence for India have a discourse and words for same-sex sexuality going back for thousands of years.
The picture also makes me think of some of the women-with-dildos pictures painted on Greek wine-vases from around 500 BCE; Bernadette J. Brooten's Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (ignore the subtitle--it's a brilliant book that looks at the pagan Roman & Jewish contexts in depth before addressing the Christian one) has pictures and some discussion; Martin F. Kilmer's Greek Erotica in Attic Red-Figure Vases treats the subject in more depth, I think, but I haven't read him.
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Date: 2010-04-02 04:39 pm (UTC)As far as reference books go, I would recommend checking out some of Ruth Vanita's edited collections; she has several about the representations of same-sex desire in India that have very good historic (including ancient and medieval) sources. (This is just a guess, as the drawing style seems very South Asian to me, but I bet it's a lot more specific in terms of region and time period, and I could be wrong.) I've heard her speak and I think she's very smart; I believe her work nicely deconstructs the whole Foucault "homosexuality was invented in the West in the 19th c" argument, which I have minimal patience for, with a lot of evidence for India have a discourse and words for same-sex sexuality going back for thousands of years.
The picture also makes me think of some of the women-with-dildos pictures painted on Greek wine-vases from around 500 BCE; Bernadette J. Brooten's Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (ignore the subtitle--it's a brilliant book that looks at the pagan Roman & Jewish contexts in depth before addressing the Christian one) has pictures and some discussion; Martin F. Kilmer's Greek Erotica in Attic Red-Figure Vases treats the subject in more depth, I think, but I haven't read him.