ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to examine the ethico-political implications of ‘ethnic narcissism’ through an analysis of Harjant Gill’s video Milind Soman Made Me Gay (2007). Drawing on Rey Chow’s theorization of the ethnic writer’s autobiographical turn in diaspora and to psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, the essay plays close attention to Gill’s use of intermediality to think through a queer diasporic politics that both deploys and undoes identity politics. If homosexuality (and narcissism) continues to be racialized in certain forms of nationalist discourse in the US, the essay suggests that we look at Gill’s narcissistic, queer performance as something that makes possible an ethnically aware self-expression as well as the articulation of the failure of an ‘authentic’ ethnic identity.
