(S)pacing Female Education in the Punjabi Sikh Diaspora: Negotiating Gender and Female Sexuality in Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Novels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I examine the work of Balli Kaur Jaswal, a Singapore-based novelist, who has written four novels about the Punjabi Sikh diaspora. I begin by establishing some of the tensions faced by a diasporic Anglophone writer today within the unequal circuits of global publishing before turning to Jaswal’s Sugarbread (2016) and Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows (2017). Here, I examine the education and socialization of both female protagonists as they face disciplining constraints from familial ties, their patriarchal ethnic community and religious orthodoxy in the specific socio-historical national and regional spaces they inhabit. Enforced in spatial ways, these constraints operate with the threat and shame of female sexual transgression serving as their collective ideological center. At the same time, I also discuss how Jaswal appropriates the fluidity of national and diasporic spaces to explore possibilities for Sikh women’s self-assertion and independence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".