Ruptured identities and resistant narratives: Mapping a discourse of the body in Indian diasporic women's fiction and film

This dissertation focuses primarily on the writings of immigrant women writers from India. It argues that the trauma of dislocation felt by the female protagonists of these texts and the psychological fragmentation that comes with being caught in between two cultures is manifested repeatedly in the violent fracturing of the female body. The woman's body thus becomes a site for the exploration of the trauma of displacement. Marked as multiple, vulnerable and dislocated, the woman's body signifies emergent diasporic subjectivities and identities for South Asian women. The dissertation explores issues of subject formation and questions of identity by attempting to look at the ways in which the female protagonists of these texts construct their own identity in an alien nation. In addition to texts about the lives of immigrant women, this study also analyzes films by diasporic women in which the protagonists are the middle and working class postcolonial women in India today. It argues that in these works, the woman's body becomes the site for a severe critique of the patriarchal traditions that seek to strictly regulate women's bodies and their sexuality in postcolonial India. While this dissertation explores the ways in which the female body is fragmented by the multiple oppressions of racism and patriarchy in diaspora, it also attempts to study the transgressive ways in which the female body becomes the site for resistance and ultimately for the construction of a new identity.