Fusing male cross-dressing with female gaze through BibhutiBushan Bandyopadhyays short story Nosumama and I

Name of Author : Victor Banerjee

Abstract: Bibhutibushan Bandopadhyays short stories strike a unique chord in everydays social reality. It provides a rich narrative to the socio-cultural morphology, mediated by the complex conjuncture of time and space. The story Nosumama and I is a seminal literary piece that brings the performative geography (Judith Butlers performativity) of a man named Narsimha residing in a village space of Bengal. The cross-dressing performativity enacted by Narsimha exudes eroticism, love and respect for Nirmala. Her feeling for Narsimha is unrequited and subdued. This paper highlights the complex emotional texture of cross-dressing and the transposition of the feminine to queering haptics (visual in this case) through textual and hermeneutical discourse. This paper also brings out the theoretical framework of Kosofskys novel gazing (1997) by navigating through the terrain of concealed desire manifested by the emotional schema.

Keywords : Time-Space, Performative Geography, Performativity, Haptics, Cross-Dressing

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