Research Scholar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus, India
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21659/jsae/v3n1/v3n123
[Article History: Received: 03 August 2026. Accepted: 25 September 2026. Published: 09 November 2026]
Abstract
Contemporary Indian cinema has witnessed an unprecedented surge in films depicting an extreme form of masculine violence and aggression. These films, with their status as commercial juggernauts, exemplify a system where certain idealized forms of manhood, characterized by exaggerated violence and emotional suppression, maintain dominance over women and other subordinated masculinities. This paper uses online participatory and transformative fiction, here fanfiction, to analyse the subversive discourse surrounding these kinds of visual media. For this purpose, I take the two films—RRR (2022) and Salaar (2023)— as fan reinterpretations that involve, as opposed to the cisgendered and heteropatriarchal settings of the canonical texts, the male protagonists in a homosexual relationship with their respective deuteragonists. Both films are male-centred—set in very ‘masculine’ environments, they make use of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms “male homosocial desire” (1985) and homosocial settings. Lacking any strong or interesting female characters and with idealized male friendships as the most common motif, they depend for their emotional appeal upon the suggestion of homosocial desire amongst men, all the while disavowing any overt homoeroticism. Echoing Michel de Certeau’s proposition to challenge the conception of consumption as formed by authorial enterprises, I conduct a close reading of two texts of fanfiction, one from each film, to establish RRR and Salaar as reflections of the deeply rooted cultural anxiety surrounding masculinity and male affection within the Indian social structure, with fanfiction questioning the ever-elusive boundaries between homosocial and homoerotic desire. Existing research on fanfiction is rooted in and continues to privilege texts originating from the Western media canon; there exists a significant absence of scholarship regarding Indian fan-narratives and particular to the Indian social context. This study attempts to fill this very gap, and argues also for greater attention to queer fan-reinterpretations in contemporary Indian film scholarship.
Keywords: transformative fiction, fanfiction, homosocial desire, heteropatriarchy, canon.
