About

As the epigraph in the project’s title signals, taken from the film Bend It Like Beckham, the idea of South Asian diasporic women as lesbians remains unthinkable, for it defies popular understandings of both an ‘ideal’ queer and an ‘ideal’ South Asian diasporic woman. Their inability to fit into the white middle-class monogamous queerdom (Duggan, 2002; Taylor, 2010) or the mould of an ethnic tradition-bearing heterosexual woman (Gopinath, 2005) has made them subject to acute scholarly neglect. And while North American scholarship has paid some attention to this intersection between race, gender and sexuality, British historiography has consistently failed to critically engage with South Asian queer diasporic communities. This PhD project aims to address this gap by looking at the experiences of working-class, queer British South Asian women in late twentieth-century Britain using oral history and archival research. Alongside utilising queer of colour oral history archives and ephemera collections located at Bishopsgate Institute, Haringey Vanguard and the Glasgow Women's Library, I aim to conduct 30-35 interviews to gain nuanced, queerer and non-white perspectives into queer identity, kinship and community building practices. The rationale behind the working-class focus is twofold. First, it is rooted in the fact that a majority of the South Asian diaspora in late twentieth-century Britain was working-class. Second, I seek to explore the theoretical implications of racialising working-class queer bodies, often considered 'deviant' due to their inability to participate in the neoliberal, gentrified constructions of a 'successful' queer life (Taylor, 2023). The project will employ queer of colour critique (Ferguson, 2004) to analyse the primary sources. This analytical framework will allow us to gain unique insights into how these women’s intersecting identities of race, gender, sexuality and class contributed to their varied and complex experiences within late twentieth-century Britain, moving beyond a binary narrative of assimilation/marginalisation.