Narratives of "Marginal" Men: Selected Short Stories of South Asian Diaspora in Australia

Abstract

Gender plays an important role in how we constitute ourselves and how writers create a subject in the domestic as well as the public life in their narratives. Despite similarities in basic immigrant experience and cultural environment, the socio-economic experience of male and female immigrants affects the construction of a gendered self and role. This paper shows how the South Asian diaspora community has changed in relation to the gender discourse over the years, by analyzing representations of male protagonists in selected short stories of South Asian diaspora in Australia. Drawing from the theories of Judith Butler, Robert E. Park, Milton Gordon, Ronald F. Levant, and others on gender (masculinity) and sexuality, this paper shifts the focus from the politics of sensory and spatial locations that diaspora studies usually highlight toward a politics of gendered location and difference. This is to see whether the stereotypical image of the marginal immigrant male still holds in postcolonial, post-patriarchal, and globalized South Asian diasporic society.