Just Good Friends: Queer Platonics, Pleasures and Friend-er Trouble in Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham

Abstract

This article re-visits Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham to ask: what if its protagonists, Jess and Jules, were not viewed as implicitly lesbian but rather as “just good friends”? By attending to platonic relationships, I argue that any sexual reading of the film is built out of other nonsexual and social bondages. Considering Sedgwick’s (1992) concept of erotic triangles and Roach’s (2012) theorisation of friendship, this article takes up intimacies and companionships that have not yet been significant queer potential. It suggests that platonic-but-queer relations open new lines of inquiry, and alternative pleasures, that extend beyond the limits of compulsory sexuality. Using examples of friendship and sisterhood in Bend It Like Beckham, platonic bonds are shown to accommodate dissident politics, queer orientations and troubling pleasures, mediating diasporic becomings for the film’s characters out of which affective politics of solidarity emerge. This reading petitions for a shift in gender and sexuality studies’ frame of reference, such that desire, friendship, intimacy, frustration, or hope might be analysed just as much and just as queerly as sex and sexuality.