Margarita with a Straw: Laila’s queer liberation

This article critically examines Freudian ‘psychology of love’, and the idea of a Freudian queer identity and self as observed in the 2015 Indian Hindi Film Margarita with a Straw . It inspects the protagonist, Laila’s life journey and her gamut of relationships with men and women, including her mother. Through the lens of Freudian theories, post-Freudian and Lacanian theories, and South Asian Cinema theories, this article argues about constructing Laila’s singular, exceptionally liberated queer identity and feminist self, which ultimately transcend the classical Freudian concepts by counter-arguing them. Furthermore, to bolster its hypothesis, this article discusses distinct ideas of sexuality, including ‘incest’, ‘perversion’, narcissistic self-love, desire, autoeroticism and homoeroticism.