Queer asian-irishness in Adiba Jaigirdar’s work

The current thesis focuses on the discussion of two diasporic coming-of-age novels written by the queer Bangladeshi-Irish author, Adiba Jaigirdar. Her novels, The Henna Wars (2020) and The Dos and Donuts of Love (2023), present the complex identity workings of two queer Asian-Irish female characters, Nishat and Shireen, in the various spaces that they inhabit. Through the conduction of a queer phenomenological exploration, this study explores the ways by which their bodies are oriented within diasporic South-Asian spaces, such as the Bengali family household, as well as within institutional white spaces, such as the Irish Catholic school that Nishat attends and The Junior Irish Baking Show that Shireen participates. Moreover, it draws attention to the disorientation that the two protagonists experience because of their intersecting identities of the female, homosexual, South-Asian, Irish and Muslim and channels it towards the exploration of the means that they employ in order to resist and reorient their bodies, namely through the appropriation of the embodied cultural practices of henna art and cooking. This thesis also examines the digital spaces of social media such as Instagram and X/Twitter as fields of action which perpetuate white heterosexual orientations. Lastly, it contends that cyberspace can be, too, reclaimed by the queer Asian-Irish protagonists and become critically reworked into a dynamic space for identity negotiations through practices like photography and blogging.