Feminist Relational Agency and the Cultural Contestation of Heteronormative Gender Norms in the Indian American Diaspora

Abstract

Through an analysis of essays published by the online magazine American Kahani, a publication that centers contemporary generations of the Indian American community, we argue that feminist relational agency allows Indian American community members to challenge dominant expressions of culturally specific heteronormative gender norms while simultaneously fulfilling their need to maintain an “authentic” sense of cultural identity. In doing so, cultural contestation emerges as a process internal to the community through which members seek to develop alternate forms of relationality while sustaining their connectedness to “Indian (American) culture.” This study contributes to scholarship about intersectional and transnational feminist agency and the Indian American diaspora by challenging the problematic application of western frameworks of agency that see non-western cultures as barriers for women of color to overcome and by specifically calling for studies that center complex and culturally specific conceptions of agency.

Keywords:

• Relational agency
• South Asian American
• diasporic identity
• cultural authenticity
• transnational feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Any reference to culture, identity, and/or authenticity throughout this essay necessarily recognizes that they are constructed and contested. India, as a nation-state, comprises many different cultures and, relatedly, cultural identities. At the same time, due to the nature of how diasporic identity can emphasize cultural authenticity, we recognize that Indian Americans often write about Indian “culture” and “identity” as singular concepts.

2 We place “American” in parentheses here and throughout this essay when referring to culture to emphasize how the continuity of certain cultural norms links Indian and Indian American cultures together.

3 “American Story”

4 As we discuss later in this essay, American Kahani targets a broader South Asian audience. However, because most of the writers of essays analyzed in this study are of Indian origin, we primarily use the term “Indian American” throughout this manuscript but refer to South Asian Americans occasionally when appropriate.

5 Due to the cultural emphasis on cultural continuity, for the purposes of this essay, “Indian American community members” includes both Indian immigrants and their children who may have been born in the United States. We further explain and justify this below.

6 Indian women have predominantly moved to the United States as trailing spouses due to cultural norms that prioritized male employment and discouraged unmarried women from emigrating. With the emergence of H-1B “work” visas in 1990, many Indian immigrant women relied on H-4 visas, issued to dependent spouses of H-1B visa holders, which, until 2015, excluded any opportunity for work authorization. This relegated the women to stay at home until obtaining permanent residency, unless they found alternative, independent means for work authorization (see Mallapragada, 2017). Even now, H-4 work authorization is limited, and applications for it are backlogged.

7 The Indian Supreme Court struck down this law in 2019.

8 Please see Sveningsson Elm (2009) for an extensive discussion of the ethical issues involved in research related to virtual environments.

9 This first-person perspective is written by Mudambi.

10 The model minority discourse frames certain racial/ethnic groups positively because they supposedly exhibit desirable characteristics, including hard work, professional careers, and rule-following. It positions such groups closer to whiteness, without affording them all of its privileges, while using them as an example by which to criticize other, “less desirable” racial/ethnic groups, thereby preserving a white supremacist racial structure (see Mudambi, 2019a, 2019b, 2023b).

11 This US Supreme Court decision established that Asian Indians, despite being classified as “Caucasian” due to their supposed Aryan lineage, could not be considered “white” and therefore were ineligible for US citizenship under the existing laws. This decision not only denaturalized Indians who had acquired US citizenship, essentially rendering them stateless, but also instigated the revocation of land purchases by them due to a 1920 Alien Land Law that prohibited those ineligible for citizenship from owning land (Das Gupta, 2006; Ngai, 2004; Takaki, 1989).

12 “Desi” is a term commonly used among Indians Americans to refer to themselves.