“I was trying to get with you’: Getting with the Politics of South Asian American Masculinity.”

Join the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology, Health and Human Performance, and Women’s and Gender Studies for a public lecture:

Title: “I was trying to get with you’: Getting with the Politics of South Asian American Masculinity”

Speaker: Dr. Stan Thangaraj, a post-doctoral fellow in Sociology at Vanderbilt University

Date: January 31, 2013

Time: 3:00pm

Location: The Alumni Center of the Education, Health, and Human Performance Building

 

Please consider supporting Dr. Thangaraj’s outstanding research and important work with communities of color in the Nashville and Atlanta communities.

Abstract: As sport is imagined as neutral site structured through meritocracy, South Asian American participation in a quintessentially American sport like basketball provides an interesting venue to understanding the politics of sport, the different relationship of this community to basketball, and the gendered, racial, and sexualized realm of citizenship.  In this paper, I demonstrate how South Asian American men practice a sport masculinity as a means to escape the
queering, emasculating experiences they have had in other public venues.  In the process of performing what they consider a normative masculinity, these young South Asian American men simultaneously expand the contours of South Asian America by foreclosing it to various gendered, sexual, classed, and racial others.  This is an ethnographic project conducted on co-ethnic only South Asian American basketball leagues and is part of book manuscript I am currently working on.

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