|
Queer
Desi Formations: Marking the Boundaries of Cultural
Belonging in
America
Gayatri
Reddy
Department
of Anthropology and Department of Gender and Women’s
Studies
University
of Illinois, Chicago
(Estados
Unidos/India)
Over
the last decade, a growing South Asian or desi gay and
lesbian community and movement has emerged in the U.S.
Individuals involved in this cultural formation stake
their claim both as members of an ethnic, sexual and
religious minority in America, and as cultural/political
citizens of a transnational world.
Drawing
on the narratives of self-identified South Asian gay men
currently living in Chicago, this paper examines queer
desi formations as sites of both regulation and
meaning-making, exploring the various tensions evident in
the crafting of South Asian sexual identity, community,
and the politics of citizenship in America today.
The
paper is organized in two parts: the first, which focuses
more broadly on the production of the South Asian social
body in the U.S, and the regulations that structure claims
to belonging or citizenship in America; and the second
part, with a focus on Chicago, explores how some of these
issues of ethnic and cultural citizenship play themselves
out within the desi queer ‘community,’ through
contested patterns of identification and disputed
regulations of normativity.
If,
as Alberto Melucci contends, contemporary social movements
are "prophets of the present," then an analysis
of the diasporic desi gay community and movement in
Chicago can perhaps teach us something about the politics
of sexuality and subject-formation in immigrant
communities, and as importantly, about broader
constructions of class, race, ethnicity, and the cultural
politics of otherness in contemporary America.
About Gayatri Reddy
Gayatri
Reddy is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Gender
and Women’s Studies at the Univeristy of Illinois at
Chicago. She is the author of With Respect to Sex:
Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (University of
Chicago Press: 2005)
|
