Yalini Jothilingam: Power, Perception and Periphery: Exploring gender and heteronormativity through Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy
Gender roles and heteronormativity are closely associated with broader structures of power, culture, class and ethnicity. Those who are in power/ center were given the responsibility of deciding the whole society’s rights and wrongs. The power plays an immense role in moulding our own selves – who we are, how we ought to behave, what our qualities should be, what we should play, and especially, whom we should love/marry. But Arjie – the protagonist – find himself conflicting with the norms, mores and defined gender roles and feel that he belongs somewhere in between a man and a woman. His maturation and consciousness of his own sexuality unfolds in the back drop of ethnic tension of the time. Instead of using strict terms as gender or homosexuality Shyam Selvadurai portrays non-heteronormativity through the experiences of an innocent child, yet emphasising it as a rival/transgressive against the central power (also the norms, laws and codes of conducts it produce) which can subvert the social implications of those established structures. The novel further explains the difficulties and stresses of living in a strictly bounded heteronormative society, where all your actions and behaviours will be closely observed. Being difference always demand a high price. Apart from Arjie, there are two other characters in the novel, who possess non-heteronormative qualities – his mother and Radha aunty. Both of them maintain secret relationships. What humiliation will his mother undergo if her extra-marital relationship was revealed? What would’ve she preferred if she had the power to decide? Attitudes or notions of the self, gender and sexual orientation can never be standardized and shrunk into a binary system. Understanding, and accepting gender diversities is a vital need of our time. It is all about equality, acceptance of plurality and finding an equal space for everyone in the world.
Biographical Statement:
Yalini Jothilingam is an undergraduate Sociology student at York University. With her pen name ‘Nivedha‘, she has been writing poems, short stories, articles and columns in various Tamil literary magazines (Kalam, Sarinihar, Anangu) and newspapers (Vaikarai, Puthiya Samatharmam) since 2005. She was also employed as one of the Assistant Editors of ‘Puthiya Samatharmam’, a registered monthly newspaper in Sri Lanka. Apart from writing, she had worked with some short film productions of Scriptnetsl, Colombo in 2007. Her credits include the film ‘The Diamond Ring’ in which she worked as the Director’s Assistant (November 2007). She had presented a paper on ‘Being a woman and a Traveller – based on feminist travel writings’ at the Women’s day conference, 2008 held at Women’s Education and Research Centre (WERC), Colombo and also on ‘Rereading texts and traditions’ at the 27th International Tamil Women Writers’ Conference held at Scarborough Civic Centre in July 2008 and served as one of the Jury members at the 7th International Tamil Short Film Festival held in November 2008.
