79 – Politics of Feminist and Queer Knowledge Production in South Asia: Interrogating Intersectionality and Coloniality

October 3, 2025
3:45 pm
H07
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.

Convenors

Radhika Govinda
Sambhavi Ganesh

Presentations

Interrogating coloniality, pursuing intersectionality and nurturing hope in knowledge-making on feminist politics in India and beyond
Radhika Govinda - University of Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, EDINBURGH, United Kingdom
Decolonise, but from whence?: Interrogating knowledge production practices from within the Global South
Nithila Kanagasabai - Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India
Political and Ethical Commitments: Interrogating the Politics of Queer Knowledge Production on Sri Lanka’s Queer Communities.
Waradas Thiyagaraja - Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom
Historiography of sexuality in post-colonial Pakistan (1950s-1990s): Sexual desire(s), erotic imaginary(s) and the politics of self in Urdu pulp fiction
Saad Khan - International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University, The Hague, Netherlands
The Baloch Yakjehti Committee: Centering Women in the Nationalist Frame
Nida Kirmani - LUMS, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan
The Making of ‘Brahmin Womanhood’: An Intersectional and Reflexive Study
Sambhavi Ganesh - School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Sex, labor, and the state of exception: On the gendered division of labor in Sri Lanka
Themal Ellawala - Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, United States