Join us for a research relay on normativity in South Asian public culture engaging with J. Daniel Luther’s book Queering Normativity and South Asian Public Culture: Wrong Readings Only. This book offers a thematic examination of normativity as it impacts gendered and sexual subjectivity.
The book demonstrates how normativity functions by querying that which appears natural, or ostensibly normal, in South Asian public culture. It engages with the consolidation and unsettling of normativity through cultural artefacts of nation states, contestations around gender and feminism in canonical and popular texts, as well as the imbrication of caste inequality within South Asian gay positionalities. The relay brings together academics and practitioners engaged in contesting normativity in the fields of gender, sexuality, and South Asian cultural studies to build a space of critical participatory dialogue. At this relay, participants expand on the contestations with normativity in South Asian public culture and complicate questions of queerness, South Asian transness*, sex worker positionalities, and new masculinities in South Asia.
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Meet our speakers and chair
Dr Rohit K Dasgupta is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the Department of Gender Studies at LSE and co-author of the forthcoming book, Desi Queers: LGBTQ+ South Asians and Cultural Belonging in Britain (Hurst/OUP, 2025). He also edits two book series: Ethnographic Innovations, South Asian Perspectives (with Niharika Banerjea & Paul Boyce) for Routledge and South Asian Screens (with Sangita Gopal) for Bloomsbury.
Dr Jo Krishnakumar (they/them) is a LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and writer-activist trained in participatory, feminist, and ethnographic research methods. They are also Fellow of the Higher Education Academy of the United Kingdom (FHEA) and a Junior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies (CATS).
Dr J. Daniel Luther is Associate Programme Director of the Rhodes Scholarship based at the University of Oxford. They are also the co-founder of the international platform and network called ‘Queer’ Asia. They are the author of Queering Normativity and South Asian Public Culture: Wrong Readings Only (2023), and co-editor of ‘Queer’ Asia: Decolonising and Reimagining Gender and Sexuality (2019). Alongside their research in the fields of South Asian culture, gender, sexuality and queer theory, they work as a consultant with Delta working on building equitable and lasting cultural change in public and private sector organisations.
Dr Shannon Philip is Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the relationship between masculinities, femininities and sexualities in cities of the Global South; and is intersectional, focusing on the ways in which race, class, caste, sexuality and gender operate in everyday social processes and their many consequences.
Dr Sadie Wearing is Associate Professor in Gender Theory, Culture and Film in the Department of Gender Studies. Her newest book Jill Craigie: Film and Feminism in Post-war Britain, co-authored with Yvonne Tasker, is forthcoming with University of Illinois Press. With Leticia Sabsay and Sumi Madhok, she edits the book series Thinking Gender in Transnational Times for Palgrave Macmillan.
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