[Reader-list] SociologySeminar at SAU: Svati P. Shah

[Diya Mehra]

The Department of Sociology, South Asian University cordially invites you
to a seminar:

 

The Critique of the Neoliberal Queer Subject in the
Era of Transnational LGBT Rights: Cities, Class, and Sexuality Politics in
India

 

By Dr. Svati P. Shah,
Department of Women’s,
Gender and Sexuality Studies

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

 

The
theoretical imbrications between cities and economic class provide a critical
frame for understanding LGBT politics in India in the contemporary moment.
Examining these politics, and the discourses of nation and modernity that they
produce, through their geographical valences offers an understanding of the
unique role of the urban imaginary in the discursive production of sexuality
and LGBT activism in India. At the same time, LGBT rights are being taken up as
a foreign policy issue, while the transnationalization of queer studies brings
with it the transnationalization of the critique of the neoliberal queer
subject. In this talk, I aim to problematize the critique of the neoliberal
queer subject by disassembling the cognate moniker ‘LGBT,’ and by mapping the
transition of the queer figure from extra-national to urban elite over the
course of the rise of LGBT juridical recognition in India since the late 1990s.

 

Svati Shah’s
research covers the political economy of migration, sex work, development,
and urbanization in South Asia and South Asian diaspora.