Department seminar: Dr. Svati Shah

This talk is drawn from a long-term ethnographic project on the persistence of critiques of material inequality in the spaces of Indian LGBTQIA+ movements. While a historical perspective embedding contemporary LGBTQIA+ movements in India as emerging from and sharing the concerns of larger democratic rights movements in South Asia is fairly uncontroversial, the difficulties of locating a singular ethnographic space in which to pursue these connections raised numerous questions about the production of the ethnographic object, and the necessity of failure in pursuing ethnographic engagements with complex questions of materialism, sexuality, and gender identity. Here, I ask what it means to ‘produce the bodies’ and the bounded field sites when the critique that emerges from ‘the field’ is an orientation to space, and not a bounded within a space that can serve as an idealized synecdoche? I sketch this as a problematic that can draw productively from the ways in which the ethnographic object and the writing it produces have been theorized in poststructural anthropological critiques.

I extend these critiques by suggesting that this problematic necessitates theorizing both from the field and from the fieldnote, particularly with respect to how the vignette can be used to think with questions of queer radicalism in the Global South. To do so, I return to how the apperceptive experience of ‘the field’ is interpellated into text and photographs in a way that produces an ethnographic archive, in which we reduce experience representationally to a form that can be assimilated with other textual forms, such that the everyday may ‘speak’ within any number of theoretical critiques and philosophical traditions. I argue that the particular question of how materialist critiques are routed through questions of sexuality gender identity in South Asia requires an appeal to the conjoined histories of photography and anthropology, which I place in conversation with a Benjamin-ian orientation to collage and ekphrasis. This is an exercise in making meaning from a complex ethnographic archive that affords much in the way of critique, via few stable referents.

About the lecturer

Dr. Svati Shah is a feminist anthropologist who works on questions of sexuality, gender, migration and caste capitalism in India. They are currently Associate Professor in Women, Gender and Sexuality studies at UMass Amherst and hold adjunct appointments in the Departments of Anthropology and Afro-American Studies. Dr. Shah’s first ethnographic monograph, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai, was published in 2014 by Duke University Press and by Orient Blackswan in India. It discussed sex work as an aspect of labor migration that is mediated by the politics of space, urbanization and caste. Dr. Shah is currently working on a book that is based on long term ethnographic research on the shifting political landscapes of queer and transgender social movements in India. The book, Dissent in Queer Times: Sexuality Politics and India’s Second (Undeclared) Emergency, offers genealogy of LGBTQI+ spaces that emerged from the autonomous feminist groups and the civil liberties and democratic rights organizations that initially formed in response to the declared (first) Indian Emergency of 1975-77. The book engages with the rise of authoritarianism and the histories of left social movements, queer feminist critique, and anthropology in South Asia.

All interested are welcome!