Playing through contradictions: Indo-Pak basketball and embodying South Asian American Masculinity

Thangaraj, Stanley I.

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Description

Title

Playing through contradictions: Indo-Pak basketball and embodying South Asian American Masculinity

Author(s)

Thangaraj, Stanley I.

Issue Date

2011-01-14T22:48:36Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Manalansan, Martin F.

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

• Manalansan, Martin F.
• Rana, Junaid

Committee Member(s)

• Abelmann, Nancy A.
• Roediger, David R.

Department of Study

Anthropology

Discipline

Anthropology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Anthropology of Gender
• Masculinity Studies, South Asian America
• Race and Ethnicity
• Anthropology of Sport
• Queer Theory

Abstract

This is a qualitative research project incorporating ethnographic methods alongside interviews. Through these qualitative research methods, I sought out how South Asian Americans attribute meaning to leisure activities of basketball and dance clubs. In particular, I examined the Indo-Pak Basketball North American circuit in general and the local Atlanta South Asian American basketball scene in particular. I looked at how South Asian Americans utilize the cultural practices in basketball to talk about belonging and citizenship at the nexus of masculinity, sexuality, race, class, and ethnicity. By examining these cultural practices of belonging, basketball presents a venue by which to provide a critique of US citizenship through South Asian American masculinity while inserting South Asian American-ness into the cultural logic of US citizenship. Sporting and leisure venues allow for such masculine pleasures and desires that contest hegemonic discourses of South Asian Americans as forever foreign—social interactions and consumptive practices of leisure allow for cultural citizenship. Yet, such counter-hegemonic practices exist in fields of power. Thus, this research project explores how South Asian American identity formation takes place in a dialectical relationship of power whereby acts of resistance and re-imagination of normativities does not do away with such fields of power. Rather, the moment of resistance also implicates other workings of power whereby these cultural parameters of South Asian American-ness, through leisure space, begin to exclude various Others—women and queer subjects. Therefore, contesting citizenship through South Asian American masculinity also leads to productions of various other normativities.

Graduation Semester

2010-12

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Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2010 Stanley I. Thangaraj

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