Queering the Medical Gaze through Intersemiotic Translation: Health, Sexuality, and Social Stigma in Satyajit Ray’s Cinema

Abstract

This article examines the intersections of health, sexuality, bodily regulation, and social stigma in selected works of Satyajit Ray through the complementary perspectives of the medical gaze, queer theory, and stigma theory. Ray’s cinema and literary works often place individuals in social environments where bodies are observed, interpreted, classified, disciplined, and evaluated according to dominant expectations about health, gender, family, sexuality, and respectability. The study argues that such representations can be read productively through a sociological understanding of the medical gaze because medical knowledge does not operate independently of wider systems of social power. The analysis further demonstrates that sexuality is not represented only through explicit sexual identities; it is also produced through family expectations, gendered behaviour, bodily visibility, intimacy, silence, and mechanisms of social surveillance. Stigma becomes significant when bodily or behavioural difference is converted into a socially discrediting attribute. Using qualitative thematic and interpretive analysis, the article identifies recurring relationships among medicalisation, normative sexuality, social judgement, concealment, marginalisation, and resistance. The study contributes to medical sociology, queer cultural analysis, stigma studies, and South Asian film scholarship by bringing these perspectives into a common analytical framework. It also proposes directions for future comparative research involving audience studies, regional cinema, contemporary digital media, and mixed qualitative-computational approaches.