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Questions of mobility and belonging: diasporic experiences queering female identities in South Asian contexts

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0950236x.2011.586778

1470-1308

Gabriele Griffin,

Migration, Refugees, and Integration

Abstract One dominant narrative about diaspora and queer identity concerns the liberating potential of the experience of dis-placement which enables both the rejection of the taboos and constraints that inform one's socio-cultural background and the articulation and enactment of one's queer identity. In this article I address this narrative by analysing two very different kinds of text, dealing with dis-placement and the enactment of queer identity. The first is anthropologist Evelyn Blackwood's (1995) account, 'Falling in love with an-Other lesbian: Reflections on identity in fieldwork'; the second is British South Asian lesbian playwright Maya Chowdhry's play 'Monsoon' (1993) which depicts the protagonist's relation with another woman on a trip 'home' from Britain to India. These texts' engagement with the issues of diaspora and queer raises a series of important issues about power, agency, embodiment, and sexual practice in ways that are remarkably similar. Both texts involve journeys from the west to South Asian countries, same-sex relationships with local 'insiders' in a context where such relationships are taboo, complex power relations between the protagonists, and issues of the relative cultural and social mobilities of the protagonists. Liberation, in so far as it occurs, is here experienced in only very limited ways and at a cost. These texts thus challenge some of the assumptions regarding the liberating potential of diaspora, and offer a rather more complex and nuanced account of the inter-relationship between diaspora and queer identity. Keywords: Queer diasporalesbian identityMaya ChowdhryEvelyn BlackwoodSouth Asia Notes Meg Wesling, 'Why queer diaspora?', Feminist Review, 90 (2008), pp. 30–46 (45). Linda Garber, 'Where in the world are the lesbians?', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14.1–2 (2008), pp. 28–50 (50). Wesling, p. 45. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 41. The numbers of female theorists on queer diaspora, as this article shows, has risen significantly over the past decade. However, not all of these address the issue of women within queer diaspora. Ara Wilson, 'Queering Asia', Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 14 (2006), n.p. At http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue14/wilson.html (accessed 24 September 2009). Jin Haritaworn, 'Shifting positionalities: empirical reflections on a queer/trans of colour methodology', Sociological Research Online, 13.1 (2008), n.p. At http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/1/13.html (accessed 24 January 2009). Ibid., p. 44. Ibid., para. 2.3. Ibid., para. 3.2. Thus Cindy Patton's and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler's Queer Diasporas (London: Routledge, 2000) tellingly employs the plural to suggest pluralities of experience and location that are then articulated in the chapter titles within this volume, e.g. 'Queer in Israel' or 'Sexing the kitchen: Okoge and other tales of contemporary Japan'. For a discussion of the proliferation of 'diaspora' studies in the 1990s see Roger Brubaker, 'The 'diaspora' diaspora', Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28.1 (2005), pp. 1–19. Jennifer Robertson, 'Dying to Tell: Sexuality and Suicide in Imperial Japan', in Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler (eds), Queer Diasporas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 38–70. Eng-Bem Lim, 'Glocalqueering in new Asia: the politics of performing gay in Singapore', Theatre Journal, 57 (2005), pp. 383–405. In this Asia, in general and South Asia in particular, in various guises feature prominently. See for example Tom Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Tom Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia. (Princeton University Press, 2005); David Eng, 'Out here and over there: queerness and diaspora in Asian American Studies', Social Text, 52.53 (Autumn/Winter 1997), pp. 31–52; David E. Eng and Alice Y. Hom (eds), Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Gayatri Gopinath, Queer Diasporas: Gender, Sexuality and Migration in Contemporary South Asian Literature and Cultural Production, PhD thesis (New York: Columbia University, 1998); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Parama Roy, 'At home in the world? The gendered cartographies of globality', Feminist Studies, 27.3 (2001), pp. 709–731. Maya Chowdhry, 'Monsoon', in Kadija George (ed.), Six Plays by Black and Asian Women Writers (London: Aurora Metro Press, 1993), pp. 56–75. Maya Chowdhry who has worked in a range of media describes herself as follows: 'Poetry is the place where I make connections; globalized dolls become radicalized, black pepper plants tell their own tales and I remember the first time I cross-dressed./I write about India and Scotland my homelands; the way they connect me through the land, my experiences of trying to make sense of my Scottish upbringing in my Indian homeland, and wanting to live in a different world entirely; one that I construct…' (http://www.litfest.org/flax005/chowdhry/reflection.htm and http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/writersgallery/content/Maya_Chowdhry.html (accessed 28 January 2009). Evelyn Blackwood, 'Falling in Love with an-Other Lesbian: Reflections on Identity in Fieldwork', in Don Kulick and Margaret Willson (eds), Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 51–75. I use the term 'mixed-race' here because this playwright has a white mother and an Indian father (see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/writersgallery/content/Maya_Chowdhry.html#reflection where she states that 'being able to be Asian and Scottish at the same time is often troublesome'). Chowdhry belongs to a generation of mixed-race feminist/lesbian/queer performers that came to prominence during the 1990s and includes Jackie Kay and Valerie Mason-John, for example. In her preface to the play, Maya Chowdhry too suggests that it has an autobiographical basis and, one might argue, thus shares that underpinning with Blackwood's account. Chowdhry writes: 'in "Monsoon" I wanted to explore taboos, women's menstruation and sexuality. My inspiration came from my own life and other women's. Most of the things in the play really happened to us…' (p. 56). It is worth noting that the play itself blends different generic forms, including prose, poetry, the epistolary. As such it is experimental in style, and this, together with its roughly chronological but episodic structure, speaks to the queer specificities of its content. In libraries, for instance, the play text would 'normally' be found in the drama/theatre/plays/literature section whilst the anthropological text might be located in anthropology/sociology/methodology. They thus occupy radically different spaces in our categorical cultural imaginaries. Haritaworn, para. 21. Both texts portray protagonists whose representation testifies to the three criteria Brubaker in 'The 'diaspora' diaspora' identifies as constitutive of diaspora: 'dispersion in space', 'orientation to a 'homeland', and 'boundary-maintenance'. (2000, p. 5). The latter are responses to the 'troubling of geographic and national stability' that diaspora can cause (Wesling, p. 45). Philip Brian Harper, Anne McClintock, José Esteban Muñoz, and Trish Rosen, Social Text, 'Introduction', special issue on 'Queer transexions of race, nation and gender', 15.3–4 (Fall/Winter 1997), pp. 52–53. Ibid., p. 52. This play, as does all of Maya Chowdhry's work, employs a poetic style and lyricism that I shall not explore in this article. It should be noted, though, that stylistically Chowdhry's and Blackwood's texts are significantly different, employing registers that situate them in their different genres. My focus in this article, however, is on the semantics of the queering of female (dis)positionalities. Blackwood, 1995, p. 51. See for example Martin F. Manalansan IV, 'In the shadows of stonewall: examining gay transnational politics and the diasporic dilemma', GLQ, 2 (1995), pp. 425–438; and Martin F. Manalansan IV, '(Re)Locating the gay Filipino: resistance, postcolonialism, and identity', Journal of Homosexuality, 26.2–3 (1993), pp. 53–72. See also Blackwood, 2005. How 'new' this actually is, is a matter of debate; highly-qualified specialists, for example, have been on the move for centuries, not least under the guild system, for instance. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 178. For a discussion of this phenomenon see Anne-Marie Fortier (2001) '"Coming home": queer migrations and multiple evocations of home', European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.4 (2001), pp. 405–424. A good example of this is Ash Kotak's Hijra (London: Oberon Plays, 2002) which features the trip 'back home' to Bombay of Nils, followed by a return to England, new Indian boyfriend in tow, and in typical Bollywood comedy style, features a happy ending where the gay couple is accepted by Nils' mother. Haritaworn (2008) and Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) both discuss the limitations of that position which had its first articulation in Kate Bornstein's Gender Outlaw (London: Routledge, 1994). From Kashmir she writes to her sister: 'it's not easy to forget Tony. It's been hard keeping it all in and not being able to tell anyone. I didn't want to say anything before, in case you told mum' (Chowdhry, Act 3, Sc. 4, p. 65). Chowdhry, Act 3, Sc. 4, p. 65. Ibid., Act 3, Sc. 7, p. 66. Ibid., Act 3, Sc. 17, p. 70. Ibid., Act 3, Sc. 7, pp. 70, 71. Ibid., Act 3, Sc. 17, p. 71. I use 'queerly' here because Jalaarnava's constraints are multiple and transcend the homo/hetero binary to encompass both. She does tell her sister about Tony, after all. Blackwood, 1995, p. 56. Ibid., p. 56. In this respect, Blackwood's work compares interestingly with that of Tom Boellstorff (2005) who conducted fieldwork in the Indonesian gay and lesbi communities but chose to be out throughout his fieldwork. Witness the significance of the old and continuing titular divisions in English between women and men (viz. Mrs, Ms, Miss, on the one hand, and Mr on the other). Importantly, only in the context of certain professional titles such as professor and doctor do those divisions vanish. Blackwood, 1995, p. 52. Tellingly, she states that she 'paid other women to take care of these domestic duties for me' (p. 57), thus enacting the role of the rich, professional foreigner who can have female servants just as men do. From a certain lesbian-feminist perspective, it might be read as sentimentalizing and as a narrative in which one woman 'uses' another woman to get over the trauma of her disappointment in a heterosexual relationship, only to leave that woman behind once the latter has fulfilled her 'healing' purpose. This has to be seen partly in the context of the chapter Blackwood was asked to produce, namely to provide an account of a taboo area within anthropological professional practice. See esp. pp. 61–62. See also Boellstorff, 2005. Blackwood, 1995, p. 62. Ibid., p. 65. Ibid, p. 67. Ibid., p. 68. I take the liberty to refer to Blackwood's notion of egalitarian lesbianism as an ideal in recognition of the complex and multifarious ways in which lesbian relationships are structured, and the ways in which such ideals are negotiated in the empirical realities of lived experiences (see, for example, the texts in David Bell and Gill Valentine [eds], Mapping Desire [London: Routledge, 1995]). Blackwood, 1995, p. 67. Ibid. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid. Ibid., p. 71 See Laurence Knopp, 'Sexuality and urban space: a framework for analysis', in David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 149–164; and witness the recurrence of the adjective 'urban' and 'city' in various chapters in Bell and Valentine (eds). See, for example, Gregory Woods, 'Fantasy islands: popular topographies of marooned masculinity', in Bell and Valentine (eds), pp. 126–148. Blackwood, 1995, p. 61. Ibid., p. 70. See, for example, the introduction to Philip Brian Harper et al., 2005. Patton and Sanchez-Eppler, p. 3. For a critique of the hierarchization of first-third worldism, and the use of that terminology, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994). Brian Keith Axel, 'The context of diaspora', Cultural Anthropology, 19.10 (2004), pp. 26–60. Chowdhry, 1995, Act 3, Sc. 4, p. 64. Ibid., Act 3, Sc. 5, p. 66. Ibid., Act 3, Sc. 4, p. 64. Blackwood, 1995, p. 68. Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 60. Blackwood, 1995, p. 63. This difficulty is also confirmed by Boellstorff's research (2005, 2007). Jerry Lee Kramer, 'Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in North Dakota', in Bell and Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 200–213. Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine, 'Wherever I Lay My Girlfriend, That's My Home: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments' in Bell and Valentine (eds), Mapping Desire (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 99–113 (100). Blackwood, 1995, p. 69. Alan Sinfield, 'Diaspora and Hybridity: Queer Identity and the Ethnicity Model', in N. Mirzoeff (ed.), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 95–114. Boellstorff, too, discusses this phenomenon (2005). See Eithne Luibhéid, 'Queer/migration: an unruly body of scholarship', GLQ, 14.2–3 (2008), pp. 169–190; and Eithne Luibhéid, '"Looking like a lesbian": The Organization of Sexual Monitoring at the United States-Mexican Border', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 8.3 (1998), pp. 477–506, for accounts of the policing and exclusion of migrants deemed to be queer. As she states: 'For example, in the United States, same-sex partners still cannot legally immigrate under the existing spousal reunification provisions of immigration law…'(2008, p. 175). Chowdhry, 1995, Act 3, Sc. 12, p. 69. Ibid. Both 'Monsoon' and 'Falling' are narrated from the perspective of the travelling first-world subject. It is their construction of Nusrat and Dayan that dominates, and one question one might want to ask is how these narratives would differ if told from Nusrat and Dayan's perspective. Ross Posnock, 'The dream of deracination: the uses of cosmopolitanism', American Literary History, 12.4 (2000), pp. 802–818 (810). Posnock, p. 804. Ibid., p. 807.