Research

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.

Neel Ahuja tracks the figure of the climate refugee in public media and policy over the past decade, arguing that journalists, security experts, politicians, and nongovernmental organizations have often oversimplified climate change and obfuscated the processes that drive mass migration. To understand the systemic reasons for displacement, Ahuja argues, it is necessary to reframe climate disaster as interlinked with the history of capitalism and the global politics of race, wherein racist presumptions about agrarian underdevelopment and Indigenous knowledge mask how financial, development, migration, and climate adaptation policies reproduce growing inequalities.

Drawing on the work of Cedric Robinson and theories of racial capitalism, Ahuja considers how the oil industry transformed the economic and geopolitical processes that lead to displacement. From South Asia to the Persian Gulf, Europe, and North America, Ahuja studies how Asian trade, finance, and labor connections have changed the nature of race, borders, warfare, and capitalism since the 1970s. Ultimately, Ahuja argues that only by reckoning with how climate change emerges out of longer histories of race, colonialism, and capitalism can we begin to build a sustainable and just future for those most affected by environmental change.

In summer 2020, when the language of racial reckoning entered US and transnational public spheres following the murder of George Floyd, the contradictions of fandom's long-standing claims to progressive politics became sharply visible. An open letter with specific demands asking the fan fiction platform Archive of Our Own (AO3) to address the issue of racist content in the archive circulated widely. After offering a brief history of critiques of fannish racism, we turn to the specifics of AO3, the political commitments embedded in its systems, and how attention to racial justice could transform them. Drawing on fan fiction genres, we offer three potential models for thinking through these possibilities: a fix-it that would extend AO3's existing metadata structures; a canon divergence that would alter the makeup of the content on AO3; and an alternative universe that draws from abolitionist organizing to imagine the broadest structural changes of all.

In 2001 a group of gay men and kotis (one of several terms used in India for feminine persons assigned male at birth, who may or may not identify as transfeminine) wrote a play titled Koti ki atma (Soul of the Koti), about a koti who dies of AIDS and returns as a ghost to prevent other kotis from having unprotected sex. This article investigates the sociopolitical context in which the play was written, analyzes its plot, and, most importantly, follows the ghost to track the labors she performs. The author offers a glimpse into the histories of care and queer community-making that exceed the terror of death and state apathy in the wake of HIV in India.

The emerging field of animal studies builds on ethical insights from the animal rights philosophies that involve an analogy between racism and speciesism, or discrimination based on species. Analyzing recent works addressing human-animal relation ships in Black studies, this essay con tends that it has been necessary for emerging scholarship on race to transcend this analogy in order to con front the persistence of anti-Black racism and contemporary environmental crisis.

ABSTRACT

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 26 September 2020, stated that India had introduced legal reforms to accord rights to transgender citizens. Even though there is not much material basis to these rights, transgender communities have been protesting against the state and at times negotiating with it to get laws that are more in alignment with their rights. In the wake of serialised deaths and precarity intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, transgender communities also stage other negotiations in the everyday with activists, transnationally funded NGOs and academics researching their communities, encounters that are not as spectacular as the protests against the state, but that which ensures their daily sustenance. This paper investigates how they inhabit these systemically violent institutions. Deploying ethnographic field notes from eastern India, this paper argues that they inhabit them subjunctively, which is not about refusing engagement with what is oppressive but about the ceaseless conjuring of improvisatory and contingent gestures that are marked by hope as well as uncertainty. The simultaneity of protests, rage, hopelessness, hope, negotiations, supplications and scepticism allow them to not only endure the violence of institutions but also to rupture them and imagine them otherwise.

Given the sensational appeal of Katherine Davis’ The End of the Road, leading to its unofficial designation in The Exhibitor’s Herald as “the most talked about Picture in America” in 1919, it is surprising the film has not received greater critical attention for its peculiarly feminist eugenic vision. Reading The End of the Road alongside other U.S. government hygiene films and contemporaneous journal articles and medical texts, I reveal a different vision of Progressive Era eugenics than that found in the well-known work of Shelley Stamp, Martin Pernick, and Stacie Colwell. Drawing a distinction between what the progressives themselves termed “positive” and “negative” eugenics, I explore hygiene cinema’s unexpected intersection with first-wave feminism, progressive economics, and welfare reform. In so doing, I reveal a window into a nearly-forgotten feminist counter-culture that briefly attained governmental support due to the overlap in membership between the American Social Hygiene Association and the U.S. War Department. At the center of this vision is The End of the Road’s eugenic heroine, Mary, who is neither a wife nor a mother but a college-educated working woman who promotes the “development of oneself for the service of mankind.”

To answer how sex, reproduction, and labor are co-articulated in robotics technologies that perpetuate capitalist racial and colonial modes of expansion and acceleration, this article examines how the category of ‘reproductive labor’ can be brought to bear upon fantasies of sex robotics and non-sex robotic projects that are about robot reproduction. As Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora have argued elsewhere, technologies that perform labor in place of humans (including sex work) still have a human cost, despite a resolute desire to see technology as magical rather than the product of human work. This is because technoliberalism – the investment in technological futures that reaffirm the subject, political economy, and social life of the present – obscures the actual labor, now unrecognized either as human-performed or even as labor, required to support robotic activity.

Published in Critical Ethnic Studies in Vol 6, No 1 (Spring 2020), this article examines the Syrian Climate War Thesis

Gayatri Gopinath's first book, Impossible Desires, published under the Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, has become a foundational text in the fields of queer and feminist studies since its publication in 2005. In Impossible Desires, Gopinath problematized the masculinist and heteronormative foundations of studies of the diaspora and its relationship to the nation-state by eloquently demonstrating how these formations cohere around constructions of normative genders and sexualities. Carefully reading queer diasporic bodies and desires, Gopinath conjured not an idyllic homeland of origin frozen in time but multiple and shifting accounts of memory, homeland, exiles, and displacements that were at once an account of colonialism and racism as they were accounts of life making that often exceeded the strictures of heteronormativity.