Sikh-Punjabi Identity in Flux: Examining Youth Masculinity in the Diaspora Through Art Gurpreet Sehra

University of Manitoba Email: umsehra@cc.umanitoba.ca

Keywords:
Aggression Canada Diaspora Gender Heteronormativity Hip-hop Homosexualtiy Identity Language Masculinity Paint Photography Punjab Sculpture Sexuality Sikh-Punjabi Silkscreen Textiles Trauma Turban Video Xenophobia Youth

1 Brief Statement
I am questioning the construction of my identity and that of the Sikh-Punjabi diasporic community. I am particularly interested in exploring Sikh-Punjabi masculinity and the male body as a site of fetishization, in the Canadian diaspora as well as to an extent the North American diasporas. Through the depiction of youth and hip hop-based Sikh-Punjabi masculinities, I contest and 1

question the kind of impact these representations could have on other gendered positions, such as my own position as a Sikh-Punjabi female. Using poetic visual language, painting, performance and moving images, I intend to transform and subvert notions of masculinity and femininity. I am influenced by an article entitled, Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots by Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai. The article outlines ways in which the post 9/11 era has created new understandings of gender and sexuality for those in the West, about certain ethnic, cultural or religious identities. Puar and Rai use the turbaned Sikh-Punjabi male as one example to frame this understanding through the use of Foucaults ideas surrounding monstrosity and the sexualized monster, focusing specifically on how nineteenth and twentieth century racial and sexual imagery and descriptions are being used to describe the modern terrorist. In looking more specifically and directly at constructions of Sikh-Punjabi masculinity, I explore conceptions of gender as related to aggression, feminization, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, cultural appropriation and power.

1.2 Brief Description

My work is focused on investigating the links between cultures and the perceptions one may have of anothers culture. I explore the underlying perceptions of the cultural self. Rooted in experimentation, I take responsibility for the outcome of the work but do not assume an apologetic stance for the new hybrids or monsters that may suggest, simultaneously, a number of seemingly contradictory or threatening connections [Figure 01.-02.].

Figure 01. Gurpreet Sehra, Not Your Native Informant, Acrylic on fabric (2010)

There is a desire to present the viewer with troubling or contradictory imagery as to open up a dialogue about the mode of depiction and about the subject being depicted.

Figure 02. Gurpreet Sehra, Dusty Roads Conceal Identities, Acrylic on vinyl fabric (2010)

1.3 Key Statement

My artistic preoccupation with complex unveilings of concealed and erased memories resulting from shame or collective pain of injustice and realities as related to the histories of Sikh-Punjabi diasporic communities has shaped my practice. I work to render these complexities by examining aggression and the feminization of Sikh-Punjabi masculinity and locating myself, as a Canadian and Sikh-Punjabi female in this picture. I am also looking at Western and Eastern ideas of vanity around facial hair and questioning racist policies and ideas around gender, faith, agency and nationalism that a 4

number of Western nations have adopted and continue to adopt. My primary focus is to examine SikhPunjabi youth culture in the diaspora and to an extent in Punjab, India. The term Sikh-Punjabi is not used exclusively. It is meant to refer to those who understand themselves to be Sikhs and understand Punjab to be a cultural or spiritual homeland and therefore is not necessarily a birth-origin co-relation. My current project makes use of the following media: painting, video, photography, performance, printmaking and installation, although in this paper I focus on the use of painting as a medium in my work. These formats allow me to become the narrator of a long, ever-changing story-inprogress, as related to the continuous transmission of history and cultural values. The story uses a multifaceted visual vocabulary that relies on internal and external observations of the Sikh-Punjabi male and self-reflectivity, in reference to myself.

1.4 Themes
I am exploring Sikh-Punjabi male identities in flux, as they are seen to float in and out of relative favour as a result of shifting cultural and political climates in the West, such as the various negative shifts in perception that occurred in the post-9/11 period or in the post-1985 Air India Flight 182 period. Through the exploration of imagery found on social networking websites, I create works that are based on my perceptions of Sikh-Punjabi males and the perceptions that they are seen to have about themselves. Some of these Western Sikh-Punjabi male identities are influenced by hip-hop culture. The young Sikh-Punjabi males often depict themselves as modern, aggressive, strong, and desirable. Media outlets often depict Sikh-Punjabi males as simply aggressive and threatening. This identity coupled with the media depictions becomes problematic when looking at how it reinforces long-standing stereotypes about Sikh-Punjabi males as rigid, fearsome, militant, patriarchal, traditional and dangerous (Puar 9). I am calling attention to the problems associated with the young Western Sikh-Punjabi identity and the effects it may have on the next generation of Sikh-Punjabi males and on Sikh-Punjabi 5

females. This is in relation or in partial opposition to New Delhi artists Thukral and Tagra [Figure 03.] who depict a slightly ironic, normalizing and partly glorified image of Sikh-Punjabi masculinity in India. Sikh-Punjabi women are visually represented far less in my work as compared to males, this being symbolic of their undiversified and precarious positioning amongst the heightened or celebritized Sikh-Punjabi male positioning. The male bodies are seen to associate themselves with a specific kind of female body in depictions of self. Just as a Sikh-Punjabi females body is seen to act as a highly Westernized, commercialized and sexualized stand-in for a female, for the Sikh-Punjabi male gaze, I often view the Sikh-Punjabi male body as a kind of stand-in, puppet or surface on which my critique of the body will take place. I am posing questions that look at my relationship, as a Sikh-Punjabi female, to an entangled Sikh-Punjabi masculinity: Does this identity undermine the Sikh-Punjabi females identity? Where does it leave her? What is my relationship to this Sikh-Punjabi masculinity? Is this masculinity erasing my own identity, where my Sikhness and Punjabiness are no longer desirable to him? Is this SikhPunjabi masculinity only but a faade of power, as a result of the marginalization and scrutiny that he has faced? Where do I stand in relation to this masculine power? Am I advocating for a female identity that is defined by a masculine one?

Figure 03. Thukral and Thagra, Phantom, Oil on canvas (2010)

2 Studio Practice
I have rejected canvas as a painting surface and the stretching of canvas onto a wooden frame in an effort to acknowledge a different lineage and to challenge the historically traditional painting surface although I am still engaged with Western painting techniques. The use of a scroll-like painting format was a conscious choice, one that asserted my desire to converse with Eastern modes and aesthetics, as well as my desire to refute dominant Western modes. This has further led to rejecting stretched canvas and wall scrolls, thus acknowledging another lineage, which is street culture. My paintings are essentially pasted onto the wall with an acrylic medium, in the way that a poster is wheat-pasted onto a street pole, having the flat appearance of wallpaper pasted onto a wall. Thus the format agrees more intimately with its environment, which is the white wall. To take this concept another step further, I am also applying paint directly to the walls increasing the temporality of the piece and its location, as well 7

as the temporality of the identity being depicted. Referencing street and Do It Yourself (DIY) culture, I am interested in engaging with the temporality of a painting and destroying the preciousness of the painted object and the white wall, as well as the painting as a muscular three-dimensional object. This equilibrium created by leveling the wall with the painting strikes me as a necessary step in reconciling my desire to break from a format that has remained nearly unchanged for several centuries. There are a number of artists who have broken out of the canvas in a number of ways. The Singh Twins [Figure 04.] are one example. They use an Indian miniature painting format to comment on contemporary British and Sikh life. My painting practice is stylistically comprehensive, borrowing, in each painting, from graphic, realist, symbolic, expressionistic and abstract styles as needed. This practice aspires to question certain perceptions, as frequently perpetuated by media outlets. With this work, I hope to provoke new modes of knowledge and perception. In my paintings, patterned fabric and painted pattern are used alongside images of my face and the faces of Sikh-Punjabi males as points of excess, censorship, and comparison. Viewers are presented with a partly decorative fabric surface primarily comprised of nonWestern and historical patterns that carry meaning and inform the painted matter which sits above and beside the patterned textile.

Figure 04. The Singh Twins, All Hands on Deck, Oil on wood (1997)

In my pieces, images of turbans, beards, hair and my own face are used as vehicles to create new understandings and question certain established definitions and assumptions about contemporary life and historical Sikh-Punjabi identities and gender locations [Figure 06]. I find it necessary to locate myself in the work and to locate the work in the West, as I am primarily addressing this context. In Threading [Figure 05.], I have painted a false beard on my face and am attempting to thread or remove it. The impossibility of this task coupled with my subtly sexual facial expression, with my mouth partly open, reveals a strange and seemingly coded dichotomy. There is a constant negotiation between the narrative, the ideas and the materials where the work often functions to pose more questions than answers or to simply pose questions. Within this context, I imagine the primary audience to be those living in the West, more specifically the various Sikh-Punjabi diasporic communities in the West. 9

I address Eastern and Western ideas of vanity around facial hair, as well as hair as sacred and what this means for Sikh-Punjabi males, females and their families. In re-enacting Sikh-Punjabi youth masculinity through my imaginings and perceptions, which are in part based on experience, I speak to the semi-permanence of identity in the diaspora. As a result, in my work I maintain a level of conceptual unresolved. This is especially evident in much of the painting, video and performance work where I am often seen having taken on the physical identity of a Sikh-Punjabi male. This act of a female performing a constructed male identity, that is seen to hold power, superficial or real, is part

Figure 05. Gurpreet Sehra, Threading, Acrylic on fabric (2011)

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Figure 06. Gurpreet Sehra, Christmas Tree, Acrylic on Fabric (2011)

of my desire to understand the power and what makes it desirable to me. This performance references sexual desire, bodily transformation, drag culture, practices of cross-dressing and subjective imaginings about being in the sexualized body of the opposite gender.

2.2 Source Materials

I am influenced by certain historical and postcolonial writers, as well as sociologists, feminists and gender theorists like Judith Butler. In her book Gender Trouble, Butler addresses the body in relation to cultural and gendered constructions (Butler 12). In The Nations Tortured Body, Brian Keith Axel also talks about the body, a gendered Sikh male body that is subject to shifting political identities as well as to a fetishization of that body (Axel 161). A dastar or turban became the most outwardly visual symbol for contemporary Sikhs as a religious and cultural artefact. Many Sikh Punjabi men donned a dastar, not because they were devoutly religious, but because historically, as a minority group, it was a visual signifier for their 11

unique identity. This desire to mark the Sikh body was not new. During the colonial era, a multitude of political and religious practices were at play upon the Sikh male body. The British had specific definitions about what a man ought to be, and advocated mimicking Christian manliness. The British civilizing mission in India was less about giving the people of India a Western mode of social and political existence, but rather sharing British Imperial power through an image of hegemonic masculinity coupled with new ideas surrounding nation-building (Banerjee 8). Definitions for men in terms of masculine conduct or behaviour were paired with nationalist ideals. For example, Sikata Banerjee outlined how the Irish developed the highly gendered concept of muscular Catholicism, which allowed the Irish to defend themselves from criticism from the British. It not only conformed to muscular Christianity but reversed the stereotypical definitions onto the British (Banerjee 9). As an extension to this point, G.L. Mosse argued that nineteenth century nationalist movements in India, and in a number of other nations, served as the origins of modern masculinity (p. 7). The Manly Sikh possessed raw, hard and desirable masculine qualities, such as strength, bravery, loyalty and discipline. His qualities juxtaposed the urban Hindu, who was represented by the figure of the effeminate Bengali man. According to the British, Bengali men did not possess manly characteristics whatsoever (Banerjee 31). In this way, types of Indian ethnicities and castes were pitted against each other through gendered norms. Many ongoing questions arise including: questioning how one could retain a cultural or religious identity that was not simply a post-memory or metaphor for a remembered or imagined distant geographical space. It brought to light that the visible marking of Sikh identity through the dastar may not adequately represent the complex set of plural understandings of Sikh history, migration and religious practice. As the desire to return home faded, contemporary Sikh identity appeared to change its focus to ask the question: where does one call home? Some contemporary struggles in Punjab surfaced with youth drug abuse, farmer suicide and the increasingly marginalized position of 12

Sikh-Punjabis. These unstable identities can be attributed to the residual effects of colonialism and caste systems, and their correlative underpinning to Sikh masculinity. The remnants of the colonial era, shifting caste relations, formative and varied religious identities, gendered religious and national identities- these issues showed prominence during the colonial era and fine fragmentary remnants of these histories persist, alongside unanswered questions. These unresolved dilemmas burdened the Sikh psyche, both as a collective fight against grander forces such as the Indian government, in the diasporas and within Punjab, as well as against an individual understanding of what it means to call oneself a Sikh today. The only constant to this subject position is that Sikh Punjabi identity remains in flux.

Works Cited
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Axel, Brian Keith. The Nations Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Print. Banerjee, Sikata. Make Me a Man!: Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Print. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print. Michel Foucault, The Abnormals, trans. Robert Hurley, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: New Press, 1997. Print. Mosse, G.L. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Print. Puar, Jasbir K. and Rai, Amit. "Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots." Social Text 20.3 (2002): 117-148. Project MUSE. Web. 27 Aug. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

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