Anxious Asian men: ‘Coming out’ into neo-liberal masculinity

ABSTRACT

The last decade-and-a-half has seen the emergence of a series of novels and memoirs exploring the fraught identities of British Asian men. This article situates the emergence of these texts in the context of interest in South Asian masculinity, and suggests ways in which these texts intervene in larger conversations, in particular regarding the War on Terror, which theorists such as Jasbir Puar have identified as imbricated in the LGBT rights paradigm. It offers readings of two memoirs, showing their reliance on the metaphor of the closet, to suggest that this use of “coming out” as a structuring device produces and is produced by a retrenchment of conservative ideas about South Asian family structures, arranged marriages, and “tradition”. Finally, it reflects on the significance of this argument at a time in which the neocolonial structures of the global War on Terror are becoming increasingly virulent.

KEYWORDS:

• British Asian
• homonormativity
• masculinity
• sexuality
• War on Terror
• Sathnam Sanghera
• Sarfraz Manzoor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Lila Abu-Lughod (2013), Judith Butler (2008) and Jasbir Puar (2007) for an analysis of each of these three figures respectively.

2. See Gayatri Gopinath (2005) and Avtar Brah (1996) for critiques of the “culture clash” model.

3. Arun Kundnani (2015) explores this change in the scholarship in some detail.

4. The popularization of life-writing has now led to the claim, published in The New Yorker, that “The Personal Essay Boom Is Over” (Jia Tolentino 2017).

5. Memoirs such as Edmund White’s (1982) A Boy’s Own Story are staples of queer literature classes.

6. For more on the conception of sexuality as the core of the self – and the centrality of this notion to racialization – see Ann Laura Stoler (1995).

7. Homonationalism was coined by Jasbir Puar (2007), who builds on ideas around homonormativity to show the ways in which gay rights can be cleaved to neo-imperial projects of nation-building and foreign intervention.

8. See also Michael Warner’s (1995) observation that “Queer politics continues regularly to invoke norms of liberal modernity such as self-determination and self-representation; it continues to invoke a civil-society politics against the state; and most significant to my mind, it continues to value sexuality by linking it to the expressive capacities of individuals. [ ... ] [A]lthough queer theory expresses scepticism about other elements of the modern sexual ideology, it relies absolutely on norms of expressive individualism and an understanding of sexuality in terms of those norms” (367).

9. For an overview of the relationship between urbanization and gay identity, see Christine Hanhardt (2013).

10. Virinder Kalra (2009) notes that this idea was present in “a Channel Four – terrestrial – television documentary ‘Culture Clash,’ which was aired in 2002 attempting to explore the reasons for alienation amongst young Muslims in the North of England, causally linked to the riots” (113). As such, it is clear that this logic has been and continues to be articulated in other contexts of crisis or violence in Britain.

11. Though “screening” for homophobia has not been systematically folded into the Prevent programme, former Conservative education minister Nicky Morgan stated: “Homophobic views may be a sign that a pupil is at risk of becoming an extremist” (BBC News, June 30, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sita Balani

Sita Balani is a lecturer in contemporary literature and culture at King’s College London. In her research and teaching, she explores the relationship between imperialism and identity in contemporary Britain, with a focus on the governance of sexuality. She is interested in the cultural and intellectual legacies of social moments, particularly in the development of antiracist and feminist politics in Britain. Her work has appeared in Feminist Review, Discover Society, Boundless, Identity Theory, Open Democracy, Photoworks and the Verso blog.