Queer diasporas: Gender, sexuality and migration in contemporary South Asian literature and cultural production (India, Ismat Chughtai, Shyam Selvadurai, Shani Mootoo)
Gayatri Gopinath, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Faculty Advisor: Rob Nixon and Robert O'Meally
Date: 1998

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Abstract

Queer Diasporas examines the literatures and popular cultural forms produced by South Asians in migrancy in various diasporic sites: Canada, Britain, the United States, the Caribbean, and South Asia. Taking the South Asian diaspora as a paradigmatic site of transnational cultural production, the dissertation demands that we locate the formation of racial, sexual, and gender subjectivities both across multiple national sites as well as in specific localities. Through a reading of various forms of South Asian transnational popular culture (bhangra music and popular Indian cinema), the dissertation identifies both the potentialities and limits of diaspora as a theoretical framework, and argues that diaspora must be conceptualized outside a patrilineal, genealogical economy of organic heterosexuality. The dissertation then moves to a discussion of the work of Ismat Chughtai, an Urdu woman writer of the 1930s and 1940s, alongside a contemporary piece of queer anthropology. This juxtaposition of texts reveals the incommensurability of different models of sexual subjectivity, and the need to articulate a specifically diasporic model for studying sexuality transnationally. Queer Diasporas concludes with a reading of contemporary South Asian diasporic fiction (the novels of Shyam Selvadurai and Shani Mootoo) that theorizes queer subjectivity through processes of transnationalism and gendered labor migrations, as well as through the complicated negotiations of state regulatory practices and multiple national sites undertaken by transnational sexual subjects.

Subject Area
LITERATURE, ASIAN (0305); LITERATURE, CANADIAN (ENGLISH) (0352); LITERATURE, AMERICAN (0591); LITERATURE, ENGLISH (0593)