The masquerade : Indian Punjabi Sikh women and the renegotiation of boundaries and body identity in Australia

Abstract

This thesis argues that Sikh women in Australia experience the burden of protecting the cultural traditions of their religious group. Here an analysis is made of their attempt to construct a new boundary or a new space for themselves. Sikh immigrant women in Australia are what Spivak termed, and other post-colonial writers have also noted, the "third-world displaced woman", caught between tradition and modernisation. Sikhs, a religious cultural group from Punjab, India, have for centuries proclaimed the equality of the sexes in their faith. Yet, Sikh women are tied to their cultural religious boundaries even when they have left the homeland of Punjab and sought to renegotiate their boundaries and body identity elsewhere. I argue that the religious culture of the Sikhs carries the same meaning and weight to them as any ethnic identification so that whatever geographical area they emigrated to, they usually set up enclaves to distinguish themselves from the wider population. My theoretical and analytical framework for studying how Sikh women in Australia renegotiate their cultural boundaries and body identity in order to find a space for themselves in the new culture, draws on concepts of culture and cultural boundaries, post-colonialism and body identity. The study incorporates a qualitative phenomenological methodology that seeks to understand the lived experience of Sikh women who have either migrated to Australia from Punjab or who have been born to parents who emigrated from Punjab. The study's findings will help to determine how Sikh women renegotiate boundaries and identities in order to live successfully in two cultures. The elements included in this study are a theory-based discussion of the issues, field work, researcher's notes and observations, and analysis of the data. Show more