79 – Politics of Feminist and Queer Knowledge Production in South Asia: Interrogating Intersectionality and Coloniality
This panel delves into the politics of feminist and queer knowledge production in South Asia, viewed through the lens of intersectionality and coloniality. What constitutes feminist and queer knowledge in the subcontinent? How is it produced and by whom, and relatedly whose knowledge counts or who all are seen to legitimately produce it? Colonialism has ended but it continues to cast a long shadow on feminist and queer knowledge production in South Asia. Gender studies, postcolonial studies, Dalit studies and queer studies offer important critiques of dominant forms of knowledge as singular, homogenous, and exclusionary yet gender and intersecting inequalities continue to thrive in academia, digital knowledge platforms, social movement archives, and development literature. The papers on this panel will explore the politics, dilemmas, challenges and hopes involved in the creation and circulation of knowledge on feminist and queer politics in South Asia by academics, activists, communities, legislators, policymakers and/or development professionals. In the contemporary context of rising right-wing authoritarianism and anti-gender movements in the subcontinent and beyond, it is all the more urgent to interrogate intersectionality and coloniality in feminist and queer knowledge production in South Asia, as this panel proposes to do.
