Young, Wild*, and (somewhat) Free: A Narrative Exploration of Married Second- Generation East Indian Canadian Women and Their Relationship with Leisure

Abstract

Stemming from my personal experiences of a second-generation East Indian (SGEI) woman living in Canada, I explore the complexities of leisure within marriages. I employ postcolonial feminist theorization to contextualize the Other identity and how power relations function to change women’s leisure behaviour. Deepening our understanding of these discourses, I employed narrative inquiry to bring married SGEI Canadian’s women’s counter-narratives to the fore. Using eight one-on-one interviews with married SGEI women ages 18-35 living in the Greater Toronto Area, I illustrate these women’s counter-narratives in dialogue-based vignettes to demonstrate the multiplicities of their experiences. Highlighting the similarities, and variations in four areas: The Other and Marriage, The Other and Performance, The Other and Agency, and The Other and Judgment. Together, the findings detail the competing discourses working to Other the married SGEI Canadian women’s identity. More specifically, East Indian marriages complicate gender role expectations through added pressures of the honour gaze and surveillance mechanisms that discipline our actions. Women use agency and negotiation to resist, challenge, and manipulate power structures through leisure activities. Given that the voices of married SGEI Canadian women have been ignored in leisure literature, this research contributes to the importance of understanding the reasons behind our leisure actions and, why we do what we do.