Queer Spaces, Places, and Gender: The Tropologies of Rupa and Ronica

Abstract

Much queer theory in America is based on white male experience and privilege, excluding people of color and severely limiting its relevance to third-world activism. Within the last decade and a half, chronicles from gay lesbian bisexual transgender intersex queer (GLBTIQ) communities within the South Asian diaspora in the United States have appeared, but the richness and contradictions that characterize these communities have been stifled. Too often, the limitations due to undertheorized South Asian-American lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual histories—compounded by a queer canon overwrought with the East/West and tradition/modern equations—render queer South Asian-Americans as a monolithic homogenous category with little or no agency. In this paper, I visit paradoxes, difficulties, unity, and diversity by unraveling the lives of two gender-queeridentified second-generation South Asian-American “women,” Rupa and Ronica. This article addresses the ways in which an often invisible and marginalized group—gender-queer second-generation South Asian-Americans—accepts, manipulates, and resists hegemonic powers. I accomplish this by presenting partial data from a year-long cross-national feminist ethnographic study conducted in 2004.