Practices of (neoliberal) governmentality: racial and gendered gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction

Michel Foucault’s notion of neoliberal governmentality is important in the context of the portrayal of the private sphere of the family by diasporic writers. Family, which is generally defined in terms of its functionality, when considering the difficulties of integration into the non-natal culture from the perspective of the uprooted migrants, is often referred to, erroneously, as the locus of privacy, individuality and autonomy. Among the works of the contemporary writers of Indian diaspora experience in America, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999) has addressed issues of displacement, assimilation and acculturation modifying Indian diaspora individuals and families. This essay analyses two of her short stories “Mrs. Sen’s” and “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” to examine the strategies employed to monitor, regulate and (re)form racial and gendered identities within the seemingly private domain of the Indian diaspora families in the process of establishing a socially acceptable congruence of images for the members of the migrant family. Using the personal sphere of the family as an example of constraint that perpetually fixes subjects to their disciplinary apparatuses, Lahiri portrays the capillary functioning of it through various acts of looking. This essay seeks to explore some of the complex dynamics of the gaze in Lahiri’s stories with a particular focus on the coercive character of power and the unequal gendering of the (examining) gaze

Circulation of the discourse of American nationalism through allegiance to consumer citizenship in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

This essay examines South Asian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s literary engagement with the re-Orientalization and sexualization of a collective subject described as Indian diaspora within the context of contemporary consumer culture. The essay explores the relationship between Lahiri’s best-selling novel, The Namesake (2003) and its contemporary society by taking the point of view that diasporic literary writing is an example of a Foucauldian social apparatus—a new form of governmentality—that was used for the production of American nationalism after the events of 9/11. Here, we expose the material and ideological specificities that formulate a particular group of women as powerless consumers in the context of the post-cold war period. More precisely, we focus on the ideological elements of the routine consuming experiences of these women to unpack the manner in which the macropolitics of economic and political structures influence the micropolitics of the everyday experiences of Indian immigrants in the capitalist society. In Lahiri’s fiction, the Indian woman’s body—in its both first- and second- generation types—is figured as a deliberate site of economic and erotic excess that fundamentally complies with the contemporary heteronormative ideology of patriarchal capitalism, wherein the woman is essentially treated as the archetypal consumer. In effect, as the essay further argues, Lahiri’s fiction dances to the tune of Western marketing demands of production and consumption

Patriarchal Regime of the Spectacle: Racial and Gendered Gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

This article attempts to evince the political, cultural and affective consequences of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings and their particular enunciations of the literary gaze. To do so, it details the manner in which the stories’ exercise of visual operations rigidly corresponds with those of the Panopticon. The essay argues that Lahiri’s narrative produces a kind of panoptic machine that underpins the ‘modes of social regulation and control’ that Foucault has explained as disciplinary technologies. By situating Lahiri’s stories, “A Real Durwan” and “Only Goodness,” within a historicalpolitical context, this essay aims at identifying the way in which panopticism defines her fiction as both a record of and a participant in the social, sexual and political ‘paranoia’ behind the propaganda of America’s self-image as the land of freedom. We maintain that Lahiri’s fiction situates itself in complex relation to the postcolonial concerns of the late twentieth century, suggesting that through their fascination with a visual literalization of the panoptic machine, and by privileging the masculine gaze, the stories legitimate the perpetuation of socially prescribed notion of sexual difference

Nihilation of femininity in the battle of looks: a Sartrean reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A temporary matter”

The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman’s entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to examine the sexual politics of metaphors of vision in a literary text that is controversially argued to be a voice for the subordinated Indian immigrant women in the US. As one of the most influential schools of thought in Western philosophy, the Sartrean paradigm of sexual difference is employed to investigate this allegation by identifying the latent binary system at work in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has garnered substantial yet controversial critical attention over her representations of gender. Specifically, this essay focuses on Lahiri’s prefatory story to her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), to unravel the manner her exercise of vision in this narrative perpetuates the dichotomies of a male subject and a female object pre-established in the traditional hierarchies of gender in the West. In this story, Lahiri (un)wittingly privileges masculinity over femininity and reduces the latter to a typically disgusting Sartrean female body of holes and slime. Hence, notwithstanding infrequent emasculated images of the male subject, it is ultimately the masculine that, in the battle of looks between male and female, nihilates the Other to the state of “being-in-itself” and enjoys supremacy over the feminine

Nihilation of Femininity in the Battle of Looks: A Sartrean Reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter”

The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman’s entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to examine the sexual politics of metaphors of vision in a literary text that is controversially argued to be a voice for the subordinated Indian immigrant women in the US. As one of the most influential schools of thought in Western philosophy, the Sartrean paradigm of sexual difference is employed to investigate this allegation by identifying the latent binary system at work in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has garnered substantial yet controversial critical attention over her representations of gender. Specifically, this essay focuses on Lahiri’s prefatory story to her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), to unravel the manner her exercise of vision in this narrative perpetuates the dichotomies of a male subject and a female object pre-established in the traditional hierarchies of gender in the West. In this story, Lahiri (un)wittingly privileges masculinity over femininity and reduces the latter to a typically disgusting Sartrean female body of holes and slime. Hence, notwithstanding infrequent emasculated images of the male subject, it is ultimately the masculine that, in the battle of looks between male and female, nihilates the Other to the state of “being-in-itself” and enjoys supremacy over the feminine

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

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

Pseudoacromegaly

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. Individuals with acromegaloid physical appearance or tall stature may be referred to endocrinologists to exclude growth hormone (GH) excess. While some of these subjects could be healthy individuals with normal variants of growth or physical traits, others will have acromegaly or pituitary gigantism, which are, in general, straightforward diagnoses upon assessment of the GH/IGF-1 axis. However, some patients with physical features resembling acromegaly – usually affecting the face and extremities –, or gigantism – accelerated growth/tall stature – will have no abnormalities in the GH axis. This scenario is termed pseudoacromegaly, and its correct diagnosis can be challenging due to the rarity and variability of these conditions, as well as due to significant overlap in their characteristics. In this review we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of pseudoacromegaly conditions, highlighting their similarities and differences with acromegaly and pituitary gigantism, to aid physicians with the diagnosis of patients with pseudoacromegaly.PM is supported by a clinical fellowship by Barts and the London Charity. Our studies on pituitary adenomas and related conditions received support from the Medical Research Council, Rosetrees Trust and the Wellcome Trust

Patriarchal Regime of the Spectacle: Racial and Gendered Gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction

This article attempts to evince the political, cultural and affective consequences of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings and their particular enunciations of the literary gaze. To do so, it details the manner in which the stories’ exercise of visual operations rigidly corresponds with those of the Panopticon. The essay argues that Lahiri’s narrative produces a kind of panoptic machine that underpins the ‘modes of social regulation and control’ that Foucault has explained as disciplinary technologies. By situating Lahiri’s stories, “A Real Durwan” and “Only Goodness,” within a historical-political context, this essay aims at identifying the way in which panopticism defines her fiction as both a record of and a participant in the social, sexual and political ‘paranoia’ behind the propaganda of America’s self-image as the land of freedom. We maintain that Lahiri’s fiction situates itself in complex relation to the postcolonial concerns of the late twentieth century, suggesting that through their fascination with a visual literalization of the panoptic machine, and by privileging the masculine gaze, the stories legitimate the perpetuation of socially prescribed notion of sexual difference.

Panoptic spaces and the framings of South Asian diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s selected short stories

This article carries out a (con-) textual analysis of cultural crossings, with a particular focus on the notions of assimilation and syncretism, in certain of Jhumpa Lahiri’s diasporic writings. By situating two of her short stories “This Blessed House” and “The Third and Final Continent” within the social-political context of the post-1960s America—when the country witnessed the re-emergence of Orientalism and the rise of a conflicting social phenomenon called neoliberalism—we pursue two important questions: How might the subjectivity of diasporas, under the pretext of convergences with mainstream rubrics, become a part of the apparatus of the hegemonic power? And, how can the rise of neoliberalism justify the ruptures between diverse cultural and political entities, and subsequently, be linked to the emergence of minority culture? To this end, Foucault’s notion of panoptic spaces is used to examine the politics of cultural convergences and religious synthesis, and to analyze the relationship between the formulated identities and the dominant praxes within the fabric of both narratives. We conclude that the stories celebrate convergent measures of the minority culture, reinforce pre-established stereotypes and resonate with an existing public policy interest in regulating diasporic individuals from afar