Women's Studies Program
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/7491
2024-03-29T10:05:02Z
2024-03-29T10:05:02Z
Queer spaces, places, and gender: the tropologies of rupa and ronica
Badruddoja, Roksana
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/191780
2020-04-20T21:54:03Z
2008-01-01T00:00:00Z
Queer spaces, places, and gender: the tropologies of rupa and ronica
Badruddoja, Roksana
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 homog-enous 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.
From NSWA Journal, Vol. 20(2), pp. 156-188, available online: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/246761. Copyright © 2008 by NWSA Journal
2008-01-01T00:00:00Z