Elizabeth Segran: Friendship and Other Marginalities: Female Bonds in the Classical Tamil Tradition
In the Sangam corpus, poems written in the akam genre are replete with articulations of sexual desire and intimacy. It is therefore understandable that the akam anthologies are largely conceived as an exploration of romantic love. This view is substantiated by the Tolkappiyam, which asserts that the purpose of the akam poems is to describe and delineate the phases of love within the realm of human experience.
While the poems focus on the issue of heterosexual union, the discourse about marriage and sexuality does not take place between lovers but between close friends of the same gender. While the akam genre is premised on romantic love, friendships are arguably the more salient relationships in the poems. These friendships are diverse, spanning the social spectrum. Women share their heartbreak with their girlfriends, mothers gather to mourn the loss of daughters that have eloped, courtesans and wives commiserate about the man they both love. These bonds between women have been marginalized in the existing analysis of the classical Tamil poems, from the Tolkappiyam onwards; friendship has served as a mere backdrop to the ostensibly more important relationship of marriage.
My paper explores these homosocial relationships that serve as the context for discourse about the erotic in this poetic tradition. Other gender scholars, such as Eve Sedgwick and Sharon Marcus, have examined the issue of homosociality in different historical and cultural milieus. Using their theories as a point of departure for my own, I attempt to deploy a framework that transcends the simple dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Instead, I consider the intimacy found in the liminal, interstitial spaces of friendship that sublimate and divert women’s sexual desire. I am interested in how these bonds empower women, but also how women themselves undermine these bonds in order to reify the heterosexual matrix.
Biographical Statement:
Elizabeth Segran is a Doctoral Candidate studying under George Hart in the Tamil Studies Program at UC Berkeley. She will be receiving her PhD from the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. Her area of focus is classical Tamil poetry, particularly the anthologies of Sangam love poems. She is currently completing her dissertation, Expressions of Desire and the Desire for Expression: Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in Classical Tamil Poetry. In her work, she deploys a range of feminist theories in her literary analysis of the Sangam texts. Her larger project is concerned with the methodology of applying theories of sexuality forged within the modern, Western context to other time periods and cultures. She is also working on a volume of annotated translations of the Vaiyai poems from the Paripadal with her colleague V. N. Muthukumar. She is supported by fellowships from the University of California, the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture and the Mustard Seed Foundation.
