Sexual Politics of the Gaze and Objectification of the (Immigrant) Woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

Abstract

Gayatri Spivak’s repeated accusations against the hyphenated Americans of colluding in their own exploitation is noteworthy in the context of diasporic writers’ portrayal of immigrant women within the prevailing discourse of anti-Communism in the United States. The woman in South Asian American writings is often portrayed as still stuck in the traditional prescribed gender roles imposed by patriarchal society. This essay explores Jhumpa Lahiri’s literary engagement with the contemporary racialization and gendering of a collective subject described as the Indian diaspora in her Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). Specifically, it focuses on the two stories of “Sexy” and “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” to analyse the manner dynamics of the gaze operate between the male and female characters. The numerous acts of looking that take place in these stories fall naturally into two major categories: the psychoanalytic look of voyeurism and the historicist gaze of surveillance. Through a rapprochement between the two seemingly different fields of the socius and the psychic, the study concludes that the material and ideological specificities of the stories that formulate a particular group of women as powerless, passive, alien and monstrous are rooted in the contradictory cultural and moral imperatives of the contemporary American society.