Liberal Studies Assistant Professor Jeff Roy has guest edited a special issue of Feminist Review titled “Queer Elsewhere ←→ South Asian Imaginaries,” which explores gender diversity and sexual identity across South Asia and beyond.
The special issue led by Roy, Pavithra Prasad (Cal State Northridge), Rumya Putcha (University of Georgia) and Omar Kasmani (Freie Univesität, Berlin) offers unique perspectives on queer and hijra-thirunangai-Khwaja Sira-trans experiences in the global South, as part of a collective effort to decolonize queer studies.
“The articles, essays and multi-modal works in this themed issue journey beyond area and queer studies’ analytical habits to center queer and trans figures as abundantly loving and desiring, not just as suffering,” said Roy. “While the issue speaks to the material conditions of queer and trans representational and experiential geopolitics, it also explores how configurations of South Asian queer and hijra-thirunangai-Khwaja Sira-trans experiences—such as those shaped by class and diaspora, caste and gender, erasure and presence—offer themselves as translucencies through which to glimpse an even more ephemeral vision of queerness out of time, place and culture.”
The special issue brings together 18 artists, creative practitioners, activists and scholars across a range of fields with ties to South Asia. Among the featured pieces include the article, “Bodies that Matter: Partition Masculinity and the Transgender Archive in Qissa” by Colorado College Professor Rushaan Kumar, a coda titled “South Asia and Sexuality: Still | Here” by UC Santa Cruz Professor Anjali Arondekar, and visual work from the “Tomorrow We Inherit the Earth” installation series by artist, curator and activist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
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