Essay: The Politics of Desire and Longing By Bijaya Biswal

In this personal essay, Bijaya Biswal elaborates on how prejudices shape desire and it’s manifestations beyond the image of the female body.

“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of the woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

When I first watched Blue Is The Warmest Colour, I realized it wasn’t an ode to lesbian relationships as much as an erotic spectacle. Almost pornographic as if, it was made from a male perspective and for the visual pleasure of a male audience. The unnecessary involvement of a male spectator in a love story between two women meant a desperate, forcible attempt to grasp a power which was lost. Lesbian love would mean no space for patriarchy, lesbian love would mean a chance to be equals. Like bell hooks wrote in her book Feminism is for Everybody,

“Woman-identified women, whether straight, bisexual, or lesbian rarely make garnering male approval a priority in our lives. This is why we threaten the patriarchy. Lesbian women who have a patriarchal mindset are far less threatening to men than feminist women, gay or straight, who have turned their gaze and their desire from the patriarchy, away from sexist men.”