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

Queer Spaces, Places, and Gender: The Tropologies of Rupa and Ronica ROKSANA BADRUDDOJA 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 sti!ed. 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, dif- "culties, unity, and diversity by unraveling the lives of two gender-queer- identi"ed 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-Amer- icans—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. Keywords : South Asian-American / South Asian diaspora / second generation / gay lesbian bisexual transgender intersex queer (GLBTIQ) / multicul- turalism / intersectionality / politics of location / white gaze / hegemony / American Orientalism Much queer theory in the United States is based on white male experience and privilege, excluding people of color and severely limiting its relevance to third world activism. This limitation leaves many people who identify with gay lesbian bisexual transgender intersex queer (GLBTIQ) communities unable to make sense of this discourse (Kawale 2003; Islam 1998; Ingram, Bouthilette, and Retter 1997). 1 Marginalized women, such as the late Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa (1942–2004), have been thinking and writing about their experiences at intersectional locations, but the way their experiences are framed in philosophy and social theory remains uncomfortably simplistic. Queer theory in the United States continues to be thin on thinking through its intersections with gender and race. 2 ©2008 NWSA J , V . 20 N. 2 (S) Q S , P , G 157 Too often, the limitations due to undertheorized South Asian lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual histories—compounded by a queer canon overwrought with the East/West or tradition/modern equation—render queer South Asian-Americans as a monolithic homogenous category with little or no agency. 3 Within the last decade and a half, chronicles from GLBTIQ communities within the South Asian diaspora in America, such as A Lotus of Another Color (Ratti 1993) and essays in A Patchwork Shawl (Dasgupta 1998), have appeared, critically challenging western feminism and mainstream GLBTIQ theory and adopting an intersectional approach, á la Mohanty (1993, 1998). Still, the richness and contradictions that characterize these communities continue to be sti"ed with Indian-centric and Hindu-centric paradigms. In this paper, I adopt the spirit of Queers in Space (Ingram et al. 1997) and Queering Bollywood (Malhotra and Liang 2008) to visit paradoxes, dif- #culties, unity, and diversity by unraveling the lives of two gender-queer- identi#ed second-generation South Asian-American “women”: Rupa and Ronica.4 Here, I interrogate and rethink the debates around multicultural- ism, which historically have focused more on race and culture and less on class and gender (see Asher 2007). In doing so, I address the underdocu- mentation of the lives of gender-queer South Asian-Americans and their responses to normative forms of power. The paper is divided into three sections. I begin with a discussion of the design of the study, then explore the literature about second-generation South Asian-Americans—a canon preoccupied with Orientalist hetero- patriarchal ideology. I argue that the current discourse describing the lives of South Asian-Americans is monolithic and does not adequately re"ect the realities of the two informants’ stories that I share here. In the subsequent section, I review the ethnographic data to show that Rupa and Ronica produce several oppositional identi#cations to both entice and iso- late the white gaze, including the myth of the model minority. 5 Rupa and Ronica exhibit how they accept, manipulate, and resist hegemony. Third and #nally, I conclude the paper by exploring what Rupa’s and Ronica’s stories suggest for new directions in queer theory. The Study Herein, I present partial data from a year-long feminist ethnography. In 2004, I conducted in-depth semistructured con#dential interviews with a crossnational sample of twenty-#ve (n=25) second-generation South Asian- Americans, twenty-three of whom identi#ed as women and two as gender- queer. The goal of the study was to uncover second-generation South Asian-American “women’s” perceptions about their daily social practices in the United States and the manner in which they view themselves in 158 R B comparison to broader American society. The interview participants were born between 1965 and 1985, primarily lived in the United States from at least the ages of four to twenty-one, and have Bengali-speaking mothers who were born and lived in South Asia until at least the age of eighteen. 6 Within the context of the histories of arrival of South Asians in the United States, I locate my study in three central geographical sites: Central New Jersey and New York City, Central Illinois, and Northern California. As a second-generation South Asian-American woman, I began contact- ing potential informants for the study by using both snowball and con- venience sampling. In January 2004, I !rst approached friends, via e-mail and telephone, who I thought would be able to introduce me to potential respondents from their social networks of which I was not a part or to which I had little connection. My second source was e-mailing acquain- tances whom I had met through professional and cultural networks from across the nation, such as National Association Bengali Conference Youth Committee of New Jersey; South Asian Public Health Association in the Maryland/Virginia area; and South Asian Sisters, a Bay Area e-community. I asked for help in identifying and approaching prospective interview participants. From here, I began compiling a list of respondent names with their e-mail addresses and telephone numbers, and I made direct contact via email with approximately thirty-!ve (N = 35) women who were not part of my immediate social and professional circle. The twenty-!ve who responded positively became the !nal sample set. Such nonrandom sampling technique allowed me to target a portion of the population that may be underrepresented using random sampling methods. Each four- to six-hour interview spanned over a single day to include meal breaks. In this way, the “women” and I spent a considerable amount of time together outside of the actual interview in which further exchange took place. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed primarily in English, with Bengali words and phrases sprinkled within the conversa- tions. The semistructured interviews covered multiple areas of concern including coupling, work, families, food, and clothing. Although the guide was used loosely, throughout the interviews I attempted to empirically unpack how my informants saw themselves within contradictory forces of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality and citizenship dimensions in the United States. I use a voice-centered relational analytic method or microanalysis as a sound methodological tool to analyze of the interview transcripts (Strauss and Corbin 1998). In this paper, I only share the stories of two participants—Rupa and Ronica—who self-identify as gender-queer. Both Rupa and Ronica are in their early thirties; Rupa traces her heritage to Bangladesh and Northern India and Ronica traces her heritage to Calcutta, India. Both “women” are American-born (East Coast) and both learned to speak the Bengali language while growing up. Rupa identi!es as a Muslim and Ronica as a Q S , P , G 159 Hindu. Rupa is a college graduate with a degree in South Asian Studies and Ronica has a graduate degree in homeopathic medicine and acu- puncture. Rupa is a performing artist and poet residing in the Midwest and Ronica is an acupuncturist and community advocate still residing on the East Coast. I consciously chose to use a feminist model, which is a collaborative and nonoppressive research design, building on the researcher-researched relationship. I used an intersectional approach and anticategorical com- plexity as a methodological tool to examine the lives and perceptions of second-generation South Asian-American women. Feminists of color have come to realize that there is one thing that all women—even able-bodied white heterosexual middle-class women—have in common: multiple oppressions. Some women are oppressed because they live their lives within binary categories and others are oppressed because they do not !t into dichotomous categories. But all women exist on multiple identity axes. Mohanty (1988), Anzaldúa (2001), and Sandoval (1991) agreed to challenge the rigidity of identity variables and focus their attentions on the politics of difference as in#ected by hierarchical arrangements. An intersectional

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