ABSTRACT
In Funny Boy, Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel in six stories, the upper-middle class Sri Lankan Tamil narrator traces the seven years of his childhood and adolescence that preceded the Tamil-Sinhalese riots in 1983, and his family’s subsequent migration to Canada. Given the illegibility and unrepresentability of a non-heteronormative (female) subject within patriarchal and heterosexual configurations of both nation and diaspora, the project of locating a 'queer South Asian diasporic subject' - and a queer female subject in particular - may begin to challenge the dominance of such configurations. The slide from female homosociality into female homoeroticism in this scene, as well as in another where Radha rubs oil into Sita's hair, serves to locate female same-sex desire and pleasure firmly within the confines of the home and 'the domestic', rather than as that which safely occurs 'elsewhere'.
