ABSTRACT
Female subjectivity forms the primary site of dislocation in Bharati Mukherjee's stories of the making and imagining of immigrant identities in America. The experience of diaspora displaces the cultural narratives that write identity and womanhood in the home country; her stories reveal the vexed and ambivalent renarrations of 'woman' produced by the dissemination of identities. Mukherjee's representations of female subjectivity have consistently engaged western liberal feminism's paradigmatic texts of emergent selfhood. The difficulty can be located in Mukherjee's tendency to frame issues in terms that always claim maximum marginalization for her main characters. Insofar as they are victims, they are shown as being marked by racial, religious, or class conflicts; but Mukherjee obscures similar social relations in situations where they are part of the structures of dominance. Mukherjee's engagement with feminist discourse is evident in her attempts to appropriate, subvert, and rewrite the female bildungsroman.
