ABSTRACT
Recent critical work on masculinity across several disciplines regards it as a discursive phenomenon. Masculinities are always several, and they are produced relationally with respect to an ever-shifting terrain of social categories. If masculinities are always and already to be understood as produced in response to the imperatives and operations of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and class, rather than as an a priori predicate of identity, that intersectional understanding of the concept’s derivation becomes all the more urgent in the geopolitical context addressed by diaspora and transnationalism. One way of putting this point more briefly (and allusively) would be to observe that intersectional analysis becomes particularly crucial when masculinities travel, so to speak.1 While such a discursive and plural conceptualization of masculinities might imply a kind of flexibility, within a given social context, however, one configuration of masculinity is typically able to exert powerful influence over others. This tendency is often termed ‘hegemonic masculinity’, a concept delineated by R.W. Connell and James Messerschmidt so as to acknowledge the discursive relationship between the subject and the differences of history, geography, and social relations that go into the production of masculinities, as well as shifts in the hierarchical relationship among them.2 In view of the concept’s
*Email: husainkg@mcmaster.ca
Vol. 5, No. 4, 551-568, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2014.936202
constitutive discursivity, then what becomes interesting about Gautam Malkani’s 2006 novel Londonstani is its attempt to zero in on a discrete cultural locale so as to keep the focus of his narrative on a particular masculine formation. Malkani puts his intention for his novel this way:
I was […] interested in the way young people increasingly fictionalize and perform new class, gender, and ethnic identities and so fiction seemed the natural form for this book. [… I]t was easier to distill the central conclusions of my research into a novel than into a piece of academic work because I didn’t have to keep qualifying them. I just focused on characters for whom those conclusions applied most clearly and without qualification – their aggressive assertion of their ethnic identity is a straightforward proxy for the reaffirmation of their masculinity. [… W]riting Londonstani as a novel rather than an academic text felt a little like science or economics by allowing me to hold certain variables constant in order to explore those variables I was most interested in.3
