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This paper aims to critically analyze the deployment of 'gay man' as an identity category in Sharif D Rangnekar's autobiographical account Straight to Normal: My Life as a Gay Man (2019). The frequent usage of sexual identities in 'coming out' narratives often tends to reiterate and reify sexuality as a well-defined concept. Using Queer Theory's approach to identity and Akshay Khanna's postcolonial critique of categorical identities, it situates the multilayered nuances of 'gayness' and foregrounds how the hegemony of the sexual identity framework in India engenders psychological and moral dilemmas. It explores spaces like family, school, and workplace, which discursively enforce the culturally dominant images of gay men as effeminate, and unnatural, and treat them as social outcasts. And simultaneously, it probes into the problematics of negotiating the subjective experiences within the emergent collective gay community spaces, which are often dynamic and characterized by the specific community codes of socialization and intimate behavior. The paper highlights this dichotomy as it results in the psychological ambivalence of the narrator, which gets manifested in the alternating tone of the autobiographical voice, and argues how it offers a different approach to identity politics in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Vandana Mishra's autobiography I, the Salt Doll which was originally published as Mee Mithaachi Baahuli in Marathi in 2014 and translated by Jerry Pinto in 2016. It attempts to analyze the concept of protofeminism by unfolding some significant sociocultural reformations in women's lives in the colonial metropolis of Mumbai. The study explores how a section of women revolted against the rigid gender norms to assert themselves in the public realm. It also concentrates on the miserable plight of widows who adopted the nursing profession. This paper features how male stalwarts, in those days, advocated not only for the upliftment of women through education, but also championed women's involvement in theatres. The study employs narrative analysis and highlights how protofeminism can be useful to unearth Vandana Mishra's mother's strenuous challenge against regressive gender stereotypes surrounding female education and nursing profession while setting an example for women of the next generation to follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]