Cultural Perspectives on Sexual Ideologies in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy

Abstract

Aim: This article aims to reflect on the representation of diaspora, culture, sexuality and affect in Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy (1994). Arjie Chelvaratnam, Funny Boy’s young protagonist, is the adult narrator who looks back on his childhood related to his native land (Sri Lanka) from a Canadian location. He portrays his cultural translation from childhood to adulthood by recounting some incidents of his life that imperialize his experiences with his emergent same-sex desire and transgender play in a Sri Lankan setting. This paper aims to understand how an immigrant’s identity is transformed within his sexual ideologies. 

Methodology and Approach: This research paper is an analysis of a fictional novel, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, using the two main themes of diasporic culture and sexual ideologies as reflected in the novel. A novelist like Shyam Selvadurai represents the individual potential for experience—feelings heightened via diasporic mobility and same-sex desire—as a resource for producing social change and contesting forces that produce social hierarchies and alienation.

Outcome: The connection that the article describes here can be read as a confrontational act of metaphor-making in that it puts the dissimilar categories of transgender and diasporic experience into contact. At the same time, the relationship between queer and diasporic experience is not fully reducible to metaphor. Arjie’s eventual diasporic alienation is not just comparable to his nascent experiences of queer exclusion; it is an effective extension of it. If the novel is considered a linear plot that leads from childhood through to his early adolescence, Arjie's early experiences of gender regulation foreshadow his eventual diasporic loss.

Conclusion: This is the idea that Selvadurai, through his work Funny Boy as a diasporic gay writer, has contributed to the evolving homosexual consciousness and to the notion of beginning to come to terms with being gay, beginning to live out another very important part of his identity. His fiction works as a constant reminder of the worth that the individual of homosexuality has to pay rebelling against same-sex or transgender desire–emotionally and culturally.