Gendered Diasporas. Considerations on Some English-Language Novels by Women Writers of South-Asian Origin
Gendered Diasporas. Considerations on Some English-Language Novels by Women Writers of South-Asian Origin

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on the gendered identities resulting from some English-language novels by women writers of South-Asian origin, namely Brick Lane by Monica Ali, Life Isn’t All Haa Haa Hee Hee by Meera Syal and Looking for Maya and Transmission by Atima Srivastava. The discussion takes place in the postcolonial and postmodern contexts and addresses this topic in connection to other markers of identity: class, ‘race’, socioeconomic group, caste, sexual orientation, generation. Gender is regarded as a process, in movement and development, from a balanced perspective, by equally taking into consideration feminist and masculinity theories. The question of culture today must be raised in the realm of the ‘beyond’, which expresses a transit period and is defined by a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction (according to Homi Bhabbha in Introduction to The Location of Culture). Thus, gender identity is explored in the above mentioned novels as a cultural construct and on the migratory axis centre-periphery, metropolis-former empire, with some of the characters seeking to accede to what they view as the centre and others to go back to the periphery they or their parents had left. However, ‘finding the centre’ seems to pose controversial identity issues in the global contemporary world, where this is a personal construct rather than a generally acknowledged one.

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