Women in Transcultural Space: A Study of Meena Alexander's Fault Lines and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

This paper focuses on the transcultural experience of women. It attempts to understand, analyse and trace the condition of woman migrants in different spaces and their assertion of such, accounting not only that phase of their life but the whole life itself. Narrating the construction of self in life writing, in regard of both utilising and despising transcultural space, is modelled in the study through the analysis of two autobiographies, Fault Lines and Meatless Days by Meena Alexander and Sara Suleri respectively. Diaspora studies usually locate the dilemma of place, citizenship, language, culture but in recent studies the gender constrains have been added to this problem of positionality. Therefore, the study has tried to present the woman’s self-representation, migration and displacement and the development or construction of self of women and identity in a new country. Moreover, for this purpose, autobiography has provided a concrete ground where women themselves articulate their story or life journey with all their struggles. Through this articulation of ‘self’, women break the specific gender roles, and create space for self-representation and deny all kinds of restrictions.