Sayan Bhattacharya
Assistant Professor, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Research Expertise
Asia
Citizenship
Critical Race Theory
Ethnography
Everyday Life
Gender and Sexual Dissidence
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Global South
Intersectionality
LGBTQ Studies
Nationalism
Postcolonial Feminisms
Postcolonialism
Queer Of Color Critique
Queer Theory
South Asia
Trans Studies
Transnational Feminisms
Sayan Bhattacharya earned their doctorate in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Their current research is an ethnographic and archival exploration of various improvisatory and innovative strategies that Indian trans communities deploy to make life in an environment saturated by violence. These effortful strategies range from gestures that seek pleasure, negotiations with the nation state on demands of welfare to the performance of care labor for each other and devising dark humor that help trans people not only endure violence but also to refuse its overdeterminations of trans life. Sayan stages conversations between anthropologies of the everyday, trans, queer and critical disability studies scholarship on care and anti-caste literatures to study the efforts needed to reproduce an everyday that can be inhabited. Their research has appeared in Radical History Review, Global Public Health, Transgender Studies Quarterly, South Asian Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, QED and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Anthropology and Humanism among others. Sayan is the recipient of the 2023 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies for their essay "Inhabiting the State Subjunctively: Transgender Life-making alongside Death and a Pandemic". Sayan also volunteers with several community-led trans and disability rights organizations in West Bengal in India.
For more information, please visit Sayan Bhattacharya's faculty page.
Publications
On Emancipatory Potentials of a Virus: Some Thoughts
Sayan Bhattacharya explores Chaitanya Lakkimsetti's Legalizing Sex is this article publised in GLQ
Author/Lead: Sayan Bhattacharya
Legalizing Sex joins an ever-expanding body of literature on the gender and sexuality rights movements of South Asia and their contested negotiations with the nation-state. Deploying participant observation and in-depth interviews with policy makers, activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and community-based organizations (CBOs) across several Indian cities, conducted sporadically between 2007 and 2015, and discourse analysis of legal documents and activist literatures, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti demonstrates that HIV transformed the relationship between the Indian state and queer, transgender, and sex-worker communities, whom she refers to as "sexual minorities" in shorthand. This article was published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.