Masculinities Out of Line: Navigating queerness and Diasporic Identity in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

Abstract

Mindful of Avtar Brah’s idea of diasporic space as being configured by multiple locations of home and abroad, as well as by contested relations between people with diverse subject positions, I discuss bodily homecomings in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Here I align my readings with Kira Kosnick’s observation that ’geographically dispersed” queer subjects “themselves constituting diasporic communities, not on the basis of ethno-national origin, but on that of queer solidarities and shared identifications, can help to unsettle some of the assumptions of community as based on biological and biologized kinship’ (Kosnick 2010: 126). The objective of this paper is to trace how diaspora and queerness are imbricated in the construction of masculinity and male desire of the homosexual and transgendered characters in Selvadurai’s and Mootoo’s narratives, set in Sri Lankan and Trinidadian (thinly disguised as Lantanacamara) cultural landscapes respectively. In considering definitions of diaspora, one notes the implication of movement and place, whereby the consequences of movement between non-normatively produced identities and differently textured places result in repercussions for the queer mobile body in and from the former home. Thus the queer masculinities in these texts are writ on diasporic bodies that move ’between officially designated spaces’, where ’intricate realignments of identity, politics and desire take place’ (Patton and Sanchez-Eppler 2000: 3).