Simulated Lovers and Hyperreal Longing: Baudrillardian Hyperreality and Queer Desire in Cobalt Blue in the Age of Social Media

Abstract

Cobalt Blue by Sachin Kundalkar is a delicate, but effective, study of queer desire, secrecy and identity construction and thus, is a fitting reading to apply Baudrillardian reading of hyperreality. The nameless paying-guest is not a fully familiar subject but a simulacrum, a picture created out of fantasy, projection and desire. Both Tanay and Anuja create hyperreal versions of the lover, and endow him with meanings that transcend his material existence. Based on the idea of simulacra developed by Jean Baudrillard, this paper suggests that the desire in Cobalt Blue is working in a dimension whereby the representation takes the place of reality and that emotional truth is drawn out of the images and not the lived intimacy.The paper also places the novel into the background of modern social media where LGBTQIA+ identities are being reproduced and disseminates via mediated visuals, aesthetic behaviours, and symbolic identifiers. Social media creates hyperreal queer identities which seem logical, desirable and real but still dislocated to the everyday vulnerability and lived complexity. As Tanay is more in love with the imagination, rather than the mutual presence, so too are digital queer identities, which are emotionally compelling but physically distanced. The paper is an indication that Cobalt Blue offers a literary framework in regard to how the mediation of queer longing, visibility, and selfhood is mediated by simulation. Finally, the paper shows how the Baudrillard theory can be used to explain why the landscape of queer representation is so changing in that the desire is not organized by the real but by its constantly reproducing images.