"Decolonizing Gender:
Sex/ualities and Performance in South Asia and Its Diaspora"
featuring
Kareem Khubchandani, Decolonize Drag
Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Public Obscenities
Vaibhav Saria, Hijras, Lovers, Brothers
In Conversation with
E. Mara Green, Department of Anthropology
Shayoni Mitra, Department of Theater
Date: March 21st, 2024
Time: 6:00-7:30pm
Location: Held Auditorium, Barnard Hall 304, entrance at 118th Street and Broadway
Poster Art: Sumantra Mukherjee
“Decolonizing Gender” is a critical inquiry and celebration of scholarly and artistic work that seeks to decolonize both the doing and the study of gender, sex, sexuality, and performance in South Asia and the diaspora. Our event will feature a cross-disciplinary conversation amongst scholars and artists. Professors Shayoni Mitra (Theater, Barnard College) and Mara Green (Anthropology, Barnard College) will moderate a panel featuring Shayok Misha Chowdhury, a playwright and director, Kareem Khubchandani, a professor at Tufts University and a drag performer, and Vaibhav Saria, a professor at Simon Fraser University, featuring art by Kolkata based artist Sumantra Mukherjee. The discussion will address the panelists’ art and research practices, the diverse ways of being in the world embodied by variously situated South Asians, and the stakes and politics of representing, writing, and performing those ways of being across sites, media, and genres.
Shayak Misha Chowdhury is the writer and director of Public Obscenities - developed at SoHoRep and currently on extended run at Theatre for New Audiences - that tells the entangled stories of a Bengali American PhD student in India doing archival and ethnographic research on sex and gender, his Black American boyfriend, and the family, friends and acquaintances with whom they spend time.
Kareem Khubchandani is the author of Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (2020) and Decolonize Drag (2023), the latter of which, in his own words, “is bookended by the voice of Khubchandani’s drag alter-ego, judgmental South Asian aunty LaWhore Vagistan.” Khubchandani is associate professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.
Vaibhav Saria, an anthropologist, is assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University, the author of Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India (2021), and a member of the Quality of Tuberculosis Care project.
Sumatra Mukherjee is a Kolkata-based artist working on hand painted posters, murals, large public installations, etc. and is insistent on making his art practices accessible to all. His public art poster project Mass-Q-Line was commissioned by the Goethe Institut, Kolkata.
Sponsored by: Dasha Epstein Fund for Visiting Artists and Scholars, Barnard Center for Research on Women, and Barnard College Departments of Anthropology, Theatre, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
