With reference to Jenks’ (2003) notion of ‘transgression’ and Butler’s ‘gender as a performative act’ (1990), this paper intends to explore and gain understanding of how the personal, professional, religious, and... [ view full abstract ]
With reference to Jenks’ (2003) notion of ‘transgression’ and Butler’s ‘gender as a performative act’ (1990), this paper intends to explore and gain understanding of how the personal, professional, religious, and socio-cultural experience of a woman academic in a conservative, structured, constraining, and ideologically laden society may be challenged and deliberately destabilised with the change of location and time.
The research is based on a 10-day qualitative phenomenological study done on a South-Asian woman academic in an international conference held in a South American country. The data for the paper are drawn from a narrative description of the research participant. Through the narrative, the paper taps into the rapture in her emotions, beliefs, and attitudes that the participant experiences in her performativity of transgressive gender identity.
The paper finds that the South Asian gender identity attributes along with linguistic, cultural, and other semiotic resources, such as clothes, hijab, and food and drink marked as halal and haram, gestures and postures, and so on are associated with her South Asian woman identity. They play a vital role in the way the participant addresses gender identity markers, destabilises, and eventually transgresses them. First, the transgression occurs in the process of cautious censoring and measured dissociation of these markers. In other words, transgression in identity is mediated by linguistic, cultural, and other semiotic resources. Second, while the participant minimises or attempts to erase these attributes, she occupies an in-between space. The perceived temporality and momentariness, the ephemerality and the transience, and spatiality of the in-between space provoke a sense of freedom and pleasure in the participant. In other words, the desired anonymity in the in-between space is intricately intertwined with her gender performativity and pleasure of transgression. The paper also finds that the American filmic catch phrase ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ epitomises the desired assurance, security, and secrecy the participant seeks while shifting her locatedness from the South Asian country to South American country and vis-à-vis. The paper hence comes to the conclusion that invisibility and anonymity are important dynamics of transgressive gender performativity.
