ABSTRACT
This chapter uses an intersectional feminist lens to examine what the rise of certain celebrities in American popular culture can tell us about contemporary South Asian diasporic femininities. It analyzes the textual/paratextual in Kaling and Chopra’s respective shows and lives (The Mindy Project and Quantico), focussing on the following: (1) white passing through the construction of the ideal South Asian diasporic subject as middle class, Hindu and Americanized; (2) the hegemony of white masculinity in its desire for the racialized Other; and (3) the narrative of South Asian femininity as impossibly beautiful, which contains a white supremacist sub-text around desire and repulsion.
