Niheer Patel

Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow

20262027 Forum on Practice

Niheer Patel

English, History, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

CAS, 2027

Niheer Patel is a fourth year student in the College of Arts & Sciences from the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. He is majoring in English, History, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's studies. With a geographic focus on South Asia and its diasporas, Niheer is interested in the postcolonial and Asian American novel, histories of sexuality, and the relationships between the material and representative worlds. He also serves as the Chair External on the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education (SCUE) and is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board.

Reworking the Domestic: Male Domestic Workers in the novels of Aravind Adiga

The novels of Aravind Adiga feature an emerging class of waged male domestic workers in neoliberal South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Through their complication of mappings that understand domestic work as feminizing work and wage work as masculinizing work, the male domestic worker provides a queering opportunity of binaristic gender. Reading the destabilizing presence of Adiga’s protagonists on the home’s coherence, I argue that the male domestic worker occupies a necessarily genderqueer position. This analysis reads these subjects’s erotic tonality, the disintegration of realist form, and drag-like practice in The White Tiger (2008) and Amnesty (2020) to argue that the material conditions of these economically marginalized subjects create conditions that mandate androgynizing gender practice. Joining the discourses of Marxist feminism, trans studies, critical race studies, performance studies, and diaspora studies, this work serves to understand the gendering practice that operates on, through, and by male domestic workers.