Postcolonial Queer and Trans Theory: The Country, the City, and Rural Imaginaries, with Dr Svati Shah

This episode is a recording of GRIP affiliate Svati Shah’s keynote at the 2022 Bergen Exchanges. Here, Dr Shah sets the issues of gender, land rights and political enfranchisement as well as postcolonial queer and trans theory into the broader context of anti-democratic governance and battles over historical memory in India.

Svati 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 at UMass-Amherst. Dr Shah’s ethnographic monograph, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai, discussed sex work as an aspect of labour migration that is mediated by the politics of space, urbanization and caste. They are currently researching the rise of authoritarianism and the histories of new left social movements, queer feminist critique, and anthropology in South Asia.

You can read more about Svati Shah and their work at their webpage: Svati P. Shah 

This event was a part of the LawTransform Queer Lawfare seminar series (sponsored by Fritt Ord), a collaboration with GRlP (Global Research Programme on Inequality), Centre on Law & Social Transformation and Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at UiB.