Centre for Feminist Research

Colonial knowledge and postcolonial multiplicities 21 1 Religion, ritual power, exclusion and marginality: Gendertransgressive Shivashaktis in Telangana, Southern India 23 PUSHPESH KUMAR AND ARCHANA RAO M 2 Uncertain grammars, ambiguous desires: Towards a sexual politic of indeterminacy in Sri Lanka 40 THEMAL ELLAWALA 3 Twenty-five years after Dominic D'Souza: What happens when your queer icon refuses to be? 61 R. BENEDITO FERRÃO 4 The iconography of Hindu(ized) hijras: Idioms of hijra representation in Northern India 84 ARPITA PHUKAN BISWAS vi C o n t e n t s 5 "A normal person cannot be made queer": The immorality act (amendment) commission of 1968 in apartheid South Africa VASU REDDY PART II Transnational migrations and diasporic linkages 6 "I want a yaar": Pakistani muslim American gay men and transnational same-sex sexual cultures in the West AHMED AFZAL 7 Decolonizing the postcolonial body in diasporic time and space: South Asians in the Caribbean KRYSTAL NANDINI GHISYAWAN 8 Intersectionality and South Asian non-normative sexualities: The case of South Asian lesbians and bisexual women in the United Kingdom ANNA FRY, SURYA MONRO AND VICKI SMITH 9 Trans/queer South Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom: Whose "Regimes of the Normal" does "Queer" critique? SHAMIRA A. MEGHANI PART III Global economization of sexualities and gender transgressing politics 10 Trans South: Practical bases for trans internationalism RAEWYN CONNELL 11 On the limits and possibilities of LGBTI politics: Contextualizing socio-political violence and political transitions in South America JOSÉ FERNANDO SERRANO-AMAYA vii C o n t e n t s 12 Understanding gender in Nepal: Concepts and practices GYANU CHHETRI

In this short essay, I offer an alternative ontology and epistemology of the term "lesbian" vis-à-vis my relationship with my brown Pakistani mother. I bring into this reading a number of variables ranging from the geographic, historical, biopolitical, and economic to the embodied, affective, esthetic, and immaterial. In recounting formative moments of my childhood - Quranic pedagogy alongside classical voice, singing and dance lessons - I re-read the spaces that produce homosociality and homoerotics as sites of brown maternal knowledges and feminist transgressions. This essay uses memory to examine the different ways that lesbian, both as a term and a mode of being, is not necessarily attached to sexual identity and practices. Analyzing how desire and secrecy are mediated by global capital, postcolonial respectability, nation, and compulsory heterosexuality, brown erotics and sacred notes offers a close look into the nuanced relationality between a brown mother and brown ...

I take up the figure of the new Pakistani working woman as constructed in the advertising campaign of the fashion brand Working Woman to think about transnational frames of class, womanhood, piety, femininity, and empowerment. I introduce pious capital as a concept that illuminates how this figure embodies the intersections of borders where borders mean the binaries that this figure appears to transcend: she is the best of the East and worthy of the West both. Situated at the apparent intersection of the East and the West, this new Pakistani working woman represents Islam as modern (read compatible with capital), Pakistan as productive, and certain forms of piety as empowerment. This is not about the customers who frequent Working Woman or class simply as purchasing power, rather it is about the story this ad campaign by Working Woman is trying to tell and sell about Pakistani womanhood on a global stage. Part fantasy, part aspiration, part control, this new feminist story still upholds discourses of cultural and religious authenticity and heteronormative femininitywith a new fashion-forward twist. The mobility of this figure signals transnational discourses of value, and the movement of bodies, capital, affect, and aesthetics across borders.

In this essay, we join Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) and Eve Tuck’s (2009) call to decolonize and de-center “damage-centered” research, embedded in settler/colonial ways of knowing. We attend to the ethical responsibility and intimate relationalities that this contemporary moment requires of us as privileged feminist, queer, global south, and South Asian scholars. We introduce yaariyan, baithak, and gupshup to theorize queer feminist care in/as research practices. As ethics of care, compassion, and collectivity, these practices enable us to study and share knowledges together. Building on transnational feminist and queer scholarship (Chowdhury and Philipose 2016; Banerjea et al. 2017), we argue that responsible knowledges mean thinking about methods as relational rather than transactional and relationality as activated and not automatic. We explore how gupshup and baithak provide methodologies of co-production of knowledge, inclusion, accountability, sharing, and reflection. This wor...

In June 2016, Qandeel Baloch, a 26-year-old Pakistani social media star, was murdered. Her death sparked both public outrage and a policy debate around ‘honour killing’, digital rights and sex-positive sexuality across Pakistan and its diasporas. Qandeel challenged what constitutes a proper Pakistani woman, an authentic Baloch and a respectable digital citizen. As a national sex symbol, she failed at the gendered workings of respectable heterosexuality, and during her short lifetime she optimised this failure and public fetish as a technologically mediated social currency (clicks, hashtags, comments, likes, reposts) to build a transnational celebrity brand. I centre Qandeel Baloch’s life and afterlives to think through the economic entanglements of honour, racialised ethnicity, coloniality, sexual violence and social media at the intersections of globalised anti-Blackness and honourable brownness as a matter of global capital. Within these complex registers of coloniality, Qandeel’s...

Revered as the ‘Queen of Qawwali’ and ‘Queen of Sufi music’, sixty-seven-year-old Abida Parveen is a spiritual phenomenon who transcends gender while performing. She is known for her signature fashion style of buttoned-up masculine-cut kurta (tunic) with matching shalwar (loose trousers) and an ajrak (block-printed) shawl. Her aesthetic circulates within transnational and national fashion media and popular cultural spaces through descriptors such as androgynous, masculine, modest, indigenous and sacred. As a highly respected figure with widely circulating performances on both the national and international stages, as well through multiple media circuits, including television, social/digital media and broadcast concerts, Parveen's undeniable fame and her transgressive entry into an otherwise male-dominated music genre raises important questions about gender, embodiment, spirituality and the sacred. In analysing Parveen's body and dress in performance, I centre her sartorial s...

Course Website: D2L Brightspace (login via my.ryerson.ca) Calendar Description: This course surveys the history of the Middle East from early 20 th century to the present. Important topics include the role of colonial powers in the region, the development of modern Middle Eastern societies and nation states, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the impact of the Cold War, the emergence of political Islam, the tension between authoritarian modernization projects and social movements for democracy, and the experiences of ordinary men and women in the region.

This course examines the complex and conflictual relations between women and revolutionary struggles and focuses on a number of theoretical and empirical issues relevant to the Middle East and North Africa context. The course is open to both senior-level undergraduate and graduate students with different requirements.

Introduction to Research Topic, Problem, and Questions Monuments have recently "come alive" (Badilla and Aguilera 2021) to challenge the present's elision of its histories of oppression and injustice, with protestors around the world pulling down statues that memorialize the legacies of conquistadors, enslavers, Confederate generals and the architects of residential school systems. Although official apologies and truth and justice commissions suggest that taking "responsibility for the past" (Huyssen 2000) is "a central part of the present" (Jelin 2010), the statues put back on their pedestals after the Arab Spring uprisings and the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey indicate that, in the Middle East, the "endlessly present past" (de Certeau 1988) relies on the erasure of a different history of violence. Sitting in his kitchen after Turkey's 2016 coup, waiting as the police searched his apartment, writer Ahmet Altan recalled his father's arrest "on a similar morning" forty-five years earlier. "What I was experiencing was not déjà vu," he writes in his prison memoir. "Reality was repeating itself." How do people in the Middle East commemorate the violence of a revolutionary past their counterrevolutionary present denies them? This project, by exploring the memorial resistance of Kurdish women-a form of remembrance and "political action" (Fritsch 2005) that "makes it possible for past and present experiences to interact" (Pinho 2020)-reminds Altan and others convinced of the Middle East's endless authoritarian present of the emancipatory imagination of Kurdistan's revolutionary feminist pasts.

Based on data collected for the Federal Contractors Compliance Program contained on university websites, this paper attempts to make some informed and accurate assessments of the representation of racialized and Aboriginal faculty. Its preliminary findings reveal that there are significant variations among universities in the percentage of visible minorities and Aboriginal faculty; that there is a relationship between Employment Equity policies and higher percentages of visible minorities and Aboriginal faculty; that the expectation that "visible minorities" and Aboriginal faculty would be over-represented among contract faculty does not hold for "visible minorities" and that racialized and Aboriginal faculty tend to be clustered in certain faculties. Further research and more disaggregated data is, however, required to confirm these initial findings.

What is the work of racialized trans death in structuring white trans life? Tracing the chalky encounters of 'ordinary' racialized violence, this article extends Achille Mbembe's (2003) concept of necropolitics to bear upon the centrality of racialized trans death in organizing contemporary trans life. In particular, this research analyzes how the circulation of necropolitical affects-what I have termed trans "necrointimacies"-coheres a morbid sense of belonging through fear, trauma, and the consumption of racialized death in rituals of trans memorialization.

This dissertation explores the centrality of racialized trans death in structuring whiteness as emblematic of contemporary trans(normative) life. Taking my point of departure from the chalk outlines of dead bodies that frequently appear during rituals of trans memorialization, I analyze how the circulation of necropolitical affects coheres a form of trans-homonationalism within the Trans Day of Remembrance (TDOR). Held annually, TDOR events are global vigils that publicly mourn the victims of anti-trans violence. By analyzing narratives about transidentified people of colour who have been memorialized by TDOR, I place the affective circulations of racialized, necropolitical violence-a phenomenon I have termed trans necrointimacies-in conversation with TDOR to illustrate how racial decay is central to the securitization of both whiteness and trans-homonationalism within the nation-state. Through participant observation at TDOR vigils in Toronto and New York, interviews with trans people of colour, and content-analysis of the TDOR website, this research highlights complex ways in which practices of trans memorialization circulate trans necrointimacies in the service of transnormative narratives of affective belonging within the nation-state. Tracing the affective worldings that occur through the spectacularization and consumption of 'ordinary' racialized trans death, this dissertation seeks to animate the seemingly disparate narratives of counter-terrorism and trans politics, the trans body and the terrorist body, and vigilant reactions and the vigil that reacts ordinary violences.

This roundtable discussion took place January–July 2016 via e-mail after participants and special issue editors initially met in virtual mode online. The editors posed the initial questions, and participants e-mailed their responses. Two further rounds of questions and responses ensued, and participants also viewed the responses of their peers on the roundtable. The questions were intended to generate rigorous dialogue about the uses of and problems associated with political economy (PE) as a lens to analyze the experiences of trans men and women and sex- and gender-diverse peoples in different but connected geopolitical locations. The emphasis was on bringing into conversation what is underprioritized in much PE work and also transgender studies as a formation, and how, from their own academic and activist knowledge, methodological bases, and experiences, respondents might see the (re)configuration of trans* political economy toward liberatory, antiracist, decolonial, and economica...

Abstract
This paper is a feminist critical reflection on the acid attacks on women in Esfahan, Iran, in October 2014. In this paper, I argue that the state-nation relationship in Iran led to the introduction of legislation that was even more patriarchal than it was before. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the marginalization of women shaped a different silhouette, and in accordance, the configuration of women’s resistance was different in a way that the autocratic state could not tolerate. As a result, a series of acid attacks occurred in one of the most well-known historical cities of Iran, Esfahan, in which, at least based on news reports, four women were victimized. This article, analyzes the social, cultural, religious, and political aspects of this attack and women’s resistance and its impact on the law of the current constitution of Iran.
Keywords: acid attack, state-nation, Shari’ah, Islam, women’s rights, identity, violence against women