“...HEARING ABOUT THE INBETWEENS”: QUEERING THE DIASPORA THROUGH HANIF KUREISHI’S MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE Trishala Dutta St. Stephen’s College
Caught between worlds that collide as often as they collude, are we representatives of anything but ourselves? -
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
Inquisitions of queer diasporic identity narratives always seek to configure spaces of belonging, and work on shaping them through displacement and attachment. These spaces are reimagined and reconstructed through the use of memory. Memory establishes a connection between a collective or an individual’s past, between origins, heritage, and history. Identities that have been fragmented by displacement, dislocation or migration are given form and texture trough memory, and remembering. Gayatri Spivak claims the subaltern consciousness is always subjected to presuppositions, memories, and generalizations of the élite (203) which means that the memory of the subaltern is monopolized by the dominant machinery. The process of remembering both at a collective, and a personal level, is always related to the memory politics of the social institutions that both structure and validate what can be remembered and how. Theorists such as Joan Scott and Michel Foucault have written about the instances of power shaping our processes of remembering and our conceptions concerning the past. This can be picked up as an important point to analyse the role of memory in queer studies: it is important to analyze how the normative outlines the other and remembers the other as the Other. Consequently, the other is forced to constitute its self in terms of the very memory-politics that produce the othering effect. Within the postcolonial field of studies, the act of re/membering becomes a crucial reconstructive force, which along with the Foucauldian methodological tool of “counter memory” provides an alternative space for the telling of histories which have for the longest time been relegated to the margins. In the context of queer studies, remembering queerly, that is in a way that creates space for historical queer experiences, becomes a strong reconstructive force. The categories of ‘queer’ and ‘diasporic’ both imply a disruption of the fixed identity categories, making impossible the attempt to definitively ascertain location, both sexually and geographically/nationally. That is, the mobile body of the diasporic queer serves as the “mediating figure between the nation and diaspora, home and the state, the local and the global”. In Queer Diasporas, queer is defined as a particularly peripatetic mode of sexuality, a “mobility of sexuality across the globe and body” (3). The queer body is seen as a transgressive agent, who challenges not only the normative categories of desire but the stability of national identity. Queer diasporic cultural forms and practices point towards invisibilized histories of racist and colonialist violence that continue to resonate in the present and are made visible through 22
