INVITE | Book discussion | CHANGING THE SUBJECT | Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India by Srila Roy | 31 Jan | 5pm
WiSER invites you to an in-person book discussion
CHANGING THE SUBJECT
Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India
by Srila Roy
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.
Srila Roy will be in conversation with Shireen Hassim (Canada150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics, Carleton University), Bridget Kenny (Professor of Sociology, Wits University) and Pumla Gqola (Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the NMU-DSI-NRF SARChI Chair in African Feminist Imagination, Nelson Mandela University)
Srila Roy is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, author of Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence, and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement, and editor of New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities.
Tuesday, 31 January 2023
5pm
WiSER Seminar room
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building,
East Campus, Wits University