Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India

In this GoMAD (Grammars of Marriage and Desire) event supported by the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, Professor Srila Roy (University of the Witwatersrand) will be in conversation with Shuvatri Dasgupta to discuss her new monograph ‘Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India’. 

It will be online on Wednesday, 7 Jun 2023 16:00 - 18:00 CEST.

In the book, Professor 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.

She 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.

For more information, please visit the website.