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Changing The Subject
Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India
Speakers
In Changing the Subject Srila Roy maps the rapidly transforming terrain of gender and sexual politics in India under the conditions of global neoliberalism. The consequences of India’s liberalization were paradoxical: the influx of global funds for social development and NGOs signaled the co-optation and depoliticization of struggles for women’s rights, even as they amplified the visibility and vitalization of queer activism. Roy reveals the specificity of activist and NGO work around issues of gender and sexuality through a decade-long ethnography of two West Bengal organizations, one working on lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues and the other on rural women’s empowerment. Tracing changes in feminist governmentality that were entangled in transnational neoliberalism, Roy shows how historical and highly local feminist currents shaped contemporary queer and nonqueer neoliberal feminisms. The interplay between historic techniques of activist governance and queer feminist governmentality’s focus on changing the self offers a new way of knowing feminism—both as always already co-opted and as a transformative force in the world. She will engage in a discussion with Arvind Narrain, Atreyee Majumder and Swethaa Ballakrishnen about her book. This will be followed by a Q&A.
Speakers
Srila Roy
Srila Roy is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and 2022 Hunt-Simes Visiting Professor in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney. Her long-standing research and teaching expertise is in the area of transnational feminist studies. Her latest books are the co-edited, Intimacy and Injury: in the wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022) and the sole-authored, Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India (Duke University Press, 2022). She is a co-editor of the journal, Feminist Theory, and the recipient of the inaugural FTGS Global South Feminist Scholar Award from the International Studies Association (ISA). At Wits, she leads the Governing Intimacies project, which promotes new scholarship on gender and sexuality in Southern Africa and India, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
Arvind Narrain
Arvind Narrain is a visiting faculty at the Azim Premji University and the National Law School. He is the author of most recently, India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the politics of resistance.
Atreyee Majumder
Dr Atreyee Majumder is a political anthropologist. She is the recipient of the American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Research Grant (2011-12). She has a strong interest in the categories of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘space’ and their mutual imbrications. Her research is geared primarily towards interrogating how capital and the modern sovereign align, and how this nexus expresses itself on space. She has consistently published scholarly articles, and has written in popular venues, on these issues. She also conducts workshops on ethnographic methods for activists and members of the general public.
Swethaa Ballakrishnen
Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen (they/them) is Professor of Law (and, by courtesy, Sociology, Asian American Studies, and Criminology, Law and Society) at the University of California, Irvine. Primarily oriented with a socio-legal praxis, they write and teach about law’s connections to actors, institutions, and relationships at the periphery, broadly defined. Scholarship from their research projects has appeared in, among other journals, Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, International Journal of the Legal Profession, and the Journal of Professions and Organization. Their award-winning first book Accidental Feminism was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.
