Please join us for our upcoming CORTH Seminar:

The Country, the City, and Gender Identity: Land, Migration, and Rural Imaginaries with Dr Svati Shah (UMass-Amherst)

13 March, 2-3:30pm, via Zoom

Register here!

This talk examines the idea of the rural in relation to contemporary queer and trans postcolonial theory and ethnographic critique. As LGBTQI+ movements and visibility in South Asia and Africa gain momentum, these spaces also take shape as urban, developmentalist, and, in some respects, homonationalist, homocapitalist, and majoritarian. These discursive turns have profound implications for anti-democratic governance and battles over historical memory and indigeneity. In order to address these implications, the talk reads works from South Asia and Southern Africa on land rights and political economy as sites of a potentially countervailing theory of the rural and non-urban for postcolonial queer and trans theory. Interlocutors of land rights in the Global South are understood here as opening the terrain for debate on the historical production of binary gender and normative social reproduction by questioning the ways in which theories of land use and taxation under colonialism often take European industrial development as their key referent. The talk suggests that reading these works alongside new discourses of queer and trans life South Asia and Southern Africa offer opportunities to complicate the ways in which sexuality and gender politics and subjectivity are configured in relation to non-urban time and world making.

Dr. Svati P. Shah is a feminist anthropologist who works on questions of sexuality, gender, migration and caste capitalism in India. They hold adjunct appointments in the Departments of Anthropology and Afro-American Studies, and are affiliated with Asian American Studies and the Social Thought and Political Economy Program (STPEC) at UMass-Amherst. Dr. Shah is also a research associate in the University of Pretoria’s Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Development Studies. Their first ethnographic monograph, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai, was published in 2014. They are currently working on a book that engages with the rise of authoritarianism and the histories of new left social movements, queer feminist critique, and anthropology in India.

This event will be chaired by Paul Boyce, Reader in Anthropology and Sexuality Studies in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.

All are welcome and we hope to see many of you there!

Best wishes,

The Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies and Health

corth@sussex.ac.uk  / http://www.sussex.ac.uk/corth / @CORTHSussex

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