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

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.