Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Discussion Leading

Janet Audette

WST 3015

Perez

02/16/2010

Discussion leading

This reading discussed the sexual orientation of a woman, Surina A. Khan, from Pakistan. She narrated the experiences of her life from the view point of a lesbian South Asian. She explained the hardships of being someone who was viewed as different when she moved to America at the age of seven. Khan was made fun of because of her darker skin color, different clothes, and even the smell of her mothers’ cooking. Due to the constant ridicule of her classmates she assimilated to the American culture very quickly and drew further away from her own.

As Khan grew up she noticed that when her sisters would act out or rebel her parents would “fix” them by sending them back to Pakistan or the “mother land” as she called it to help the children readopt their native culture. Noticing this, she decided to wait until she was financially independent to tell her parents that she was a lesbian. By this time she had completely distanced herself from her family and their faith and only identified herself as an American lesbian. The country and the culture that she was from equated homosexuals to something that should be feared and punished with physical and emotion abuse. Not wanting to subject herself to the harsh prosecutions of the Middle Eastern ways Khan refused to visit Pakistan or associate herself with any of the people who still identified with it. Also, the culture she rejected that so harshly prosecutes homosexuals had temples displaying carvings and images of homosexuals including several pictures of woman caressing each other. However, homosexual woman are still expected to suppress their true sexuality to fit into the culture which in turn causes many South Asian woman to reject that culture.

As her life continued on, she was beginning to acknowledge that she was feeling an immense void from not being able to fully identify with the American culture and also not being able to identify with the Pakistani culture because of her sexual orientation. By accepting this she became determined to find other homosexual South Asians and form an alliance to make bonds within her own life. In creating this network of homosexual South Asians she has enable herself and others to reconnect to the culture in a way that they haven’t be able to do before. Khan hopes that some day she will be able to return to Pakistan and not feel uncomfortable because of who she is.

The question I have for the class pertaining to the reading is to find out what some of the challenges are for homosexuals acknowledging their sexuality in different cultures.

Works Cited:

Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Women’s Lives Multicultural Perspectives 5th ed. New York, McGraw-Hill, 2010

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