ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will discuss the masquerade of subaltern women with reference to questions of agency and voice. Here, I use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's idea of the subaltern as organic intellectual 2 to read women's masquerade and activism in Sari Red and Khush, two films by Asian/British film and video artist, Pratibha Parmar. Since most racial formulations of masquerade derived from dominant theoretical traditions simply substitute the position of the white woman for the postcolonial, the voices and testimony of the subaltern woman remains either submerged or simply outside the realm of discourse.3 Does this mean that the subaltern woman cannot be an active participant in her own discourse formation? Or does it mean, as bell hooks has pOinted out, that it is very difficult to theorize the position of the colored woman within current paradigms?
