I think my favorite thing to read/watch this week was the poem “diaspora” from Bodymaps. It sounds like a poetic version of the definition of “diaspora” (from my understanding). What stood out to me was the theme of always “looking back and over your shoulder”, worried that the next place you are headed to will never let you return to the last. Many of the definitions of diaspora that we read included the longing of returning to a homeland, even though it wasn’t always quite certain where exactly “home” was.

A similar/common theme I saw in many of our texts/videos was the tension felt by these queer authors between their identity as South Asian and their queer identity. They are made to feel as though queer sexualities are a western import and separate from who they really are (or maybe, who they are expected to be).  One example of this was in “Trans/Generation” when Alok Vaid-Menon says that “rather than call his grandmother transphobic,  [he] will join her in not smiling in the family photo”. I read this as there being a part of him that wants to resist the way his grandmother marks him as “different”, but there also being another part of him that wants to stand in solidarity with the oppressive experiences she has had. However, it is difficult to articulate having a multicultural identity by saying that there are “parts” of you, because this leaves you wondering if you can ever be “whole”. What do the “parts” of a multicultural identity add up to? Perhaps diaspora is about feeling as though you are “parts”, rather than a “whole”.

The reading and video about Kareem Khubchandani really captured my attention because of the mention of “auntie.” It was said that an auntie is someone who is the repository of culture and who tells us whether we are doing it right or wrong. However, through this, the space for inclusiveness towards queerness can be open. I think that even though in cultures that are not openly accepting towards queerness, the concept of an auntie can, in a way, tolerant, if not accepting, towards it. In my own experience of the Vietnamese culture, women often get together in large groups in order to spread awareness and does charity events to help other women who suffer from domestic abuse or poverty. A lot of them doesn’t even know the definition of feminism and what it stands for, and yet, what they’re doing can be consider as feminism. Another point that was brought up was that an auntie doesn’t have to be a cis woman. I think that this is very important because not all feminists are women.

Chandra Mohanty’s Under Western Eyes is an immensely important touchstone piece that everyone in academia should read. I remember reading it in my first feminist studies course and I’m so glad I get to reread it again in my final quarter here. Mohanty is disrupting and problematizing the notion that western scholarship is ahistorical and apolitical. And that western feminists working within that framework are only reproducing white supremacist structures. She looks at 5 instances where white western feminists wrote about women of the global south reinforcing and framing the monolith of all third world women being victims. It takes on a paternalistic tone that is extremely problematic, among other things. Moving forward she emphasizes how important context is when considering any situation and to also resist the universal idea of the third world women and global sisterhood.

Richa Nagar’s piece on Communal Discourses was very interesting and I would like to use some of the ideas presented in this article in my research paper. Although I am still unsure what exactly I want to work on for that project. Nagar also emphasized context in the beginning of the paper- that one cannot fully understand certain processes of colonialism and racial hierarchy without considering the gendered processes that also informed the communities. Nagar carefully traced these shifting contexts through time and space and how social reproduction and communal discourses informed marriage and migration patterns between South Asia and North Africa. I found the double bind placed on South Asian wives- the expectation of sexual purity to the point of them being denied any sexuality. That type of denial and repression made me think of Deepa Mehta’s Fire and the relationship that formed between Sita and Radha. I was wondering, while reading Nagar’s piece, if any queer relationships formed cross caste, cross class, cross racially and if any record of this exists today.

Both Mohanty and Nagar’s articles touch on the nuances of the category “woman”. In Mohanty’s piece, the universalization of woman was used as a means to push liberal, western feminism onto women in the global south. Non-western women were then inherently in need of saving via a transformation of their culture into western culture. This universalization ignores the nuances of different women across the globe, erasing the unique struggles that each woman in their time period experiences. Nagar’s piece highlights the different instances where politics, economics, and social structures that influence different ideas of purity and honor affected the ways in which migration patterns were formed. Thus, the same connection to nuance can be made in the examples that Nagar gives in that given the circumstances of the time different migration patterns emerged and a universal conceptual view of women in India and Tanzania negates women’s unique history.

In the film Fire, there is also the absence of a different kind of woman beside the normative role. Thus, when Sita and Radha spark up a relationship they do not even have a name for it. There is also lots of mention of purity from traditional stories in the film.

After reading Chandra Mohanty’s article Under Western’s Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses, I find myself agreeing with many of her points that she’d emphasized throughout the article. The most important one for me was that feminism should not be universalized because not all feminism is the same. As each country progressed, they all face different problems and one should not assume that every country all faced that problem. In the article, Mohanty stated that “the assumption of women as an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic, or racial location or contradictions, implies a notion of gender or sexual difference or even patriarchy which can be applied universally and cross-culturally,” which had left a strong impression on me. I think that such assumption should exist because, in a way, it does place a limit on what we labeled as “third world women.” Western feminists looked to women from “third world countries” as the subjects of oppression and needing help without fully understand their culture, background, and where they came from.

Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night was beautiful and tragic. The author explored different formations of kinship (between Mala and Tyler, Otoh, Ambrose and Mala, etc) and expressions of sexuality, that have been repressed through forces of heteropatriarchy and shame. Each one having a moment of bravery or self acceptance- either it be Otah or Tyler, even Lavinia and Sarah. Near the end of the novel Tyler accepts who they may be and express themselves in a more public way, after experiencing acceptance from Mala and Otty. Sarah and Lavinia’s relationship is much more tormented, and after deciding to run away together, and being forced to leave both Mala and Asha- I wondered how they recovered/if they recovered? I also wondered if perhaps they had a relationship when they were younger, before Lavinia went to the Wetlands. I guess with them being fictional characters I can fill in the blanks as the reader.The author also explored upsetting topics of incest and sexual assault. Which was hard to read and lead to Mala’s mental break and subsequent dissociations. Love is ambivalent and tormenting.

I connect this novel with the second reading by Niranjana through the ways in which life on the island of Latanacamara is subtlety described and the parallels of what Niranjana describes of the West Indies. In both the novel and chapter it seems for indentured laborers the only access to a sense of modernity and/or progress was through an education grounded in Christianity and western assimilation. It is more subtle in the novel but in both readings there is a description of how a space is changed by the influx of indentured laborers. How racial, class, and gender dynamics begin to shift.

Niranjana also goes on to describe how indentured labor and the efforts to end it did circulate around the morality of the Indian woman. There was an increased anxiety over the ‘wrong type of Indian woman’ being sent to the West Indies for work and how their flippant nature lead to increased gender violence and wife killings. The westerners observing this rise in violence spoke on it as if gendered violence doesn’t occur in the West. As if this gendered violence is a result of culture and tradition of the East.

Chandra Mohanty’s article about the colonizing discourse of Western feminists is an important piece that also speaks to issues of intersectionality and power differentials. Mohanty urges readers to stay away from universalizing women as a class, and reminds us to acknowledge the variety of differences that separate women and create hierarchy within this category.

Nagar’s article is a useful example that underscores the importance of Mohanty’s arguments. Nagar argues that gender, race, class, and religion all influenced migration patterns from India to Tanzania. The many differences that Nagar highlights in migration patterns serve to illustrate the difficulties of universalizing the class of “women”, and also shows why it should not be done.

There were a lot of interesting elements of Fire, so here I’m just going to discuss a connection I found between the film and Nagar’s article. Ideas about “purity” in the Indian diaspora (particularly Hindus) were a huge theme in Nagar’s article. I looked up Karva Chauth, the fast that the two women in the film undertake, and found that it was a Hindu tradition. I also noticed that there were a lot of references to the women’s purity in the film, including a story about a woman who must survive being burned to prove that she is “pure”. I wonder what exactly “pure” means in this context. Because Radha survives the fire at the end of the movie, does that signify her purity? I think here, “purity” means the absence of wrongdoing because I noticed that, after Radha and Sita kiss, Sita asks Radha if they have done anything wrong. Radha replies that they hadn’t.

My thoughts cannot stray away from Mala Ramchandin, as I have now just finished reading Cereus Blooms at Night. A book like this, one that doesn’t so plainly explain its purpose and meaning, always leaves me feeling the most. What that feeling is, I am not entirely sure of. But, as I read I tried to think critically, alongside absorbing the beautiful prose. My budding ideas and thoughts of the book have me going in circles about the reasonings and motivations of some characters actions. For instance, Chandin Ramachandin and Ambrose E. Mohanty could not love anyone else besides those they had fallen for as children. I think, why? Is there even a point to ask why? Then, there is the state of liminality, or more so, of an unknown in between, brought up in regards to queerness. Tyler is neither man nor woman. His position in life does not have any name to it. Which makes you think about the importance of language and words. I think that was a theme in this book–language–but I can’t exactly grasp it. Overall, this was the first book of its kind of which I’ve read with such trauma and violence and it has definitely affected me greatly. The fact that Pohpoh and Asha’s mother, Sarah, and Lavinia too, could leave them behind like that angers me to no end. With frustration, I often put the book down and exclaimed, “How could a mother leave her children behind in an effort to escape for herself alone!” Yet, I know that I can’t see it that simply. And, that there are people on the earth who live with such horror, as Mala and Asha did, now and in the future, is a tragedy. But, I am glad that, in the end, Ohto was able to churn Ambrose’s thoughts into those of self-reflection. I don’t know why this brings me comfort, given that it does not exactly change the events of the book. But it does. I am excited to discuss the book in greater detail and learn its deeper meanings.

I’m going to start off by talking about the Niranjana article, since I feel I have more to say about the novel we read for this week. Niranjana discusses Indian nationalists’ concern with the migration of “immoral” women to become indentured laborers in the Caribbean from around 1882 to 1900. Something I found interesting about this concern with “immorality” is that one of the possible explanations given for the amount of “immoral” women working as indentured servants was that only women from the lower castes made good indentured laborers, and that women from higher castes would not be so immoral. This made me think about the relationship of purity/impurity to caste that we discussed in class last week. It also reminded me of the discourse of unnatural/natural sex, because both moral/immoral and natural/unnatural are extremely vague but heavily charged binaries.

In Cereus Blooms at Night I paid close attention to the nuanced ways in which sexuality was referred to by different people. (I also considered that it might only be that way because of a choice the author made– the story is, after all, being told through his narrative voice).  For example, the way Mala chooses to tell Chandin that she accepts his sexuality is by bringing him a female nurse’s dress for him to wear. She doesn’t make a spectacle out of the gesture, causing Tyler to take it as a genuine acceptance of his true self.

I thought the development of the relationship between Sarah and Lavinia was very subtle, but then realized that this might have only been my initial reaction due to the fact that the identity of queer South Asian women is framed as being “impossible”. I had to check myself and my assumption that they were nothing more than friends from the start of their relationship.

Finally, I find myself wondering how I can connect the Niranjana article to Cereus Blooms at Night. Can they be connected, and if so, how?

Hi! I couldn’t easily figure out how to have everyone write their own posts, so for this week, please post your responses as a comment to this post. I might be able to give you author privileges by next week. Thanks!