BEND IT.
Queer Coding in South Asian Popular Culture and Law
March 12, 2026, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CT
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Presentation Description
In this Article, I use Bend It Like Beckham (“BILB” 2002, dir. Gurinder Chadha) as a starting point to critically theorize about law and the mainstream representation of queerness in South Asia. BILB follows the friendship of British Indian “Jess” Bhamra and Jules Paxton and their mutual passion for soccer. Although it was ripe with many queer undertones between the two lead characters, and despite many other nodes of subversion (raunchy humor by Indian aunties, girls playing sports, a tomboy Kiera Knightly in her first ever appearance!) the movie ended with a much less plausible suggestion of a hetero romance between Jess and her football coach. I use this movie to consider the subtle queer coding that was typical of cinematic representation of queer narratives – to be present in plain sight – that determined early queer South Asian representation and assumptions of legality and propriety.
On the one hand, we could read this as a frustratingly unfulfilled queer text, but I suggest that other more reparative readings also exist. Beyond representation, BILB offered an important inflection point for queer coding. Although active South Asian representations of queerness existed well before BILB (e.g. Deepa Mehta’s 1996 movie, Fire), I argue that BILB was unique in creating and buffering a strain of gendered identity for its generation and that it remains a useful allegory to consider the global rights movement for queer marriage and its liberal limits. In particular, I argue that BILB’s radical subversion was in being ahead of its time in its portrayal of queerness – or in its capacity for queerness to be read – within a restricted legal regime. I suggest that the opening BILB offered to be read as a queer story – which I will, through my analysis, show it is despite its straight overtones – allows for a “bending” in narrative of what we even think of progressive and “good” legal outcomes. In turn, it offers an important imaginary framework for how law can best preserve the possibility for progressive change by leaving open room for subtle and subversive interpretation across contexts. Sure, BILB could be read as “queer failure” but in reading it as possible utopic prefiguration, it offers breadcrumbs for reimagining the possibilities that legality
Part I of the Article will trace South Asian representations of queerness alongside the temporality of the queer movement in the region to more broadly make the case that visual architectures of queerness in popular TV and film have created conflations and distinctions in identity and experience, and that they offer language for the everyday navigation of legality, visibility, and inequality. In Part II, I will read BILB as a particularly unique text for considering queer representation precisely because it suggested – rather than performed to fruition – its queer undertones. Part III will connect these readings of BILB to two distinct trajectories for non-conjugality within global queer jurisprudence – a) the equality rights complex in the US and UK that has tied queer possibility to the liberal institution of state-sanctioned marriage (Obergefell) and partnership (Burden v. UK) and b) the alternative model of choice and dignity offered by the South African Constitutional Court (Bwanya). I will argue that in majority world contexts, reading queer possibilities in linear ways does an injustice to its true potentials. Instead, affording them the dignity of expansive choice can be powerful, especially when such opportunity rests without the trappings of mainstream meaning making.
About the Speaker
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen (they/them) is Associate Dean for Faculty Research and Development and Professor of Law (and, by courtesy, of Sociology, Asian American Studies, and Criminology, Law and Society) at the University of California, Irvine. They are also currently the 2025-6 William H. Neukom Fellows Research Chair in Diversity and Law at the American Bar Foundation.
Primarily oriented within a critical socio-legal praxis, they write, think, and teach about law’s connection to actors, institutions, and relationships at the periphery, usually around the conceptualization of identities, queers, and souths.
Ballakrishnen’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, AccessLex Institute, Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, and the Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy; and has appeared in, among other journals, the Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Law, Culture and the Humanities, and the International Journal of the Legal Profession. Their first book Accidental Feminism (Princeton University Press, 2021), explores the case of unintended gender parity in the Indian legal profession and its research has won honors from the Law and Society Association, American Sociological Association, Canadian Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association. Other book projects focus on collaborative legal globalization (Invisible Institutionalisms, ed. w/Sara Dezalay, Hart 2021), transnational gender regimes (w/Kalpana Kannabiran, Zubaan 2021), and global legal education (w/Bryant Garth, forthcoming). Future projects focus on queer utopias within the law, including the sociolegal navigation of new kinds of minority identities, the intersections between CRT and queer theory, law’s commitment to conjugality, and transnational queer visual cultures of legality.
Ballakrishnen is currently on the editorial boards of the Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, Journal on Professions and Organization, Asian Journal of Law and Society, and the Indian Law Review. They have served as elected trustee on the boards of the Law and Society Association, the ISA’s Research Committee on Sociology of Law, and the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education/Profession. At UCI, they co-run a center on the legal profession, a critical interdisciplinary graduate emphasis and a workshop on socio-legal studies.