my piece on Imane Khelif, the violence of binary gender, its racialised, colonial and classed underpinnings, and the urgent need to free feminisms from fragility and from racist, misogynist, transphobic, and imperial attachments
@TheContrapuntal
i graduated with a PhD in Gender Studies from
@LSEGenderTweet
yesterday. my first graduation ceremony that I have been able to attend. what a fitting end to this beautiful year! 🤞🏽✊🏽
Maria Lugones’ ‘The Coloniality of Gender’
‘That feminism centred its struggles and its theorising against a characterisation of women as fragile, weak in body & mind...But it didn’t bring to consciousness that those characteristics only constructed white bourgeois womanhood’
i have a new article on re-membering, feminist politics and coloniality in
@FeministTheory
where I analyse the epistemic-political implications of gendered and feminist activism in Kashmir.
co-writing is an incredibly restorative practice of intimacy where so much can be learned in hours-long conversations, our choice of words and how we imagine and construct the process of writing itself. i wish it was acknowledged and rewarded so much more in academia & beyond.
so incredibly grateful and honoured to receive the Michael Nicholson Thesis Prize for the best doctoral thesis in International Studies at
#BISA2023
!
what a journey this has been; so many thanks to so many wonderful people & fellow travellers.
thank you
@MYBISA
@LSEGenderTweet
so devastated to hear about
#bellhooks
but so grateful that my being has been shaped in such a big way by her thinking and writing - i am forever in debt. thank you for giving us a home, world, community when many of us couldn’t find one.
‘I came to theory because I was hurting’
Angela Davis in solidarity with students and intellectuals jailed under UAPA and journalists in Kashmir including Masrat Zahra, Peerzada Aashiq who have been targeted by the state.
Angela Davis, activist in prison abolition movement and anti-racism revolutionary, speaks in solidarity with those being targeted today under UAPA.
#StandWithJamia
#repealuapa
Wach full video here:
we're organising a small workshop on 'Land' in relation to pluriversal feminisms, multispecies justice & the Global South (also complicating 'GS'). send us your expressions of interest if you are engaged in this work.
@swatiarora_
@QMPoliticsIR
@QMUL_HSS
delighted to share that i've passed my PhD viva (no corrections)!! what an enriching intellectual experience - so many thanks to my examiners
@goldosuri
and
@agathang1
, and so much gratitude for my supervisor
@mghacademic
, advisor
@sumi_madhok
and the entire
@LSEGenderTweet
fam!
i am just so pleased and so so honoured to receive the Feminist Theory 2022 Essay Prize. deeply grateful to members of the
@FeministTheory
collective and many many people I learn from, everyday! my article is open access and will be published as part of 2023 journal issue.
horrifying how ‘both-sides’ and ‘violence is morally bad’ narratives/narrators never come alive when marginalised, oppressed, colonised people are killed everyday by violent states and statist ideologies they so ferociously back. end all occupations ✊🏽
the sheer speed at which Indians claim EVERYTHING (but of course never accept occupation) in/about Kashmir as theirs is a proof of colonial occupation, its logics and forms of violence (material, symbolic, narrative, etc) it inflicts on an everyday basis.
submitted my PhD today!!!!!!!! can’t be more grateful to so many lovely and generous people. and special thanks to Abida and Naseebo ji for their song of the year (!!!!) ‘Tu Jhoom’ which held me in the last few weeks. this is my permanent summer mood now:
some professional news: thrilled to be starting as Lecturer in Sociology at
@QMPoliticsIR
@QMUL
. I am looking forward to working and thinking alongside new colleagues and students! and v grateful for the generous mentorship and support I have received over the years. onwards!
came across this devastating yet hopeful poem by
@maggiesmithpoet
on a podcast last night. today, and everyday:
this place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
thrilled to have our article (with
@MehSamia
my co-traveller) on coloniality, feminist solidarity & everyday archives in the brilliant
@KohlJournal
issue on counter-archives. we write about colonial ghosts, haunting, border-crossing through archives:
decoloniality will remain amenable to co-optation by right wing religious supremacists until there is careful historicisation of oppressive power structures (of caste) *before and persisting with* the colonial encounter. de is not rescuing an imagined past!
the second workshop on ‘Pedagogy’ as part of ‘Pluriversal Feminisms and Multispecies Justice: thinking with/from the Global South’ will be held on 24 May. write to us if you are interested & envision classroom as a space of feminist praxis
@swatiarora_
@QMPoliticsIR
@QMUL_HSS
📆 inviting abstracts from artists, activists, researchers for 'A World in Revolution' online feminist conference. how do we engage with social movements from a transnational, anti-racist and anti-colonial feminist standpoint? for more information:
listening to dr Linda Smith talk about how indigenous research projects are not about filling a knowledge "gap" (of course in anglophone literature) but germinate in conversation with communities. wondering if western academy will ever create space for training PhDs this way.
just thinking about India and for academics to expedite publishing their papers, they would have to pay a whopping sum of Rs 300,000!!!! at display: global coloniality + capitalism and their deep tentacles in GN academia!!
we are putting together listening circles for support in these unprecedented times in india. join us for non-judgemental sharing and holding of our collective grief. this is an anticaste, antifascist and anticolonial feminist listening space. sign up here:
excited & grateful to be co-convening
@MYBISA
Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial Working Group with
@CataWinnie
&
@sarah_gharib
. our annual ECR workshop on 'Anti-imperial feminist architectures of resistance' will be held on 5 December in London. follow
@BisaCpd
for updates.
it is v important to frame this conversation - & strongly resist - in relation to the settler state’s disposability/expendability of Palestinian workers and displacing them with marginalised Indian workers. it is important to call out the Indian state’s complicity +
Labour unions in India must resolutely oppose the new deal to send over a lakh Indian workers to replace Palestinian workers in Israel's settlements.
Indian workers are not cheap canon fodder to replace their own Palestinian brothers who have been tortured, harassed and killed-
A year after my dad's death, I was able to (hopefully) make some sense of grief, mourning, complicated love and rebuilding that elusive thing called home as most of the world finds itself in the coronavirus lockdown. The essay is out on
@firstpost
Kiski Azadi? Kaunsi Azadi?
our struggles against patriarchy, caste and class supremacy, fascism, colonialism and their gruesome violence are all connected. until we realise this, there will be no true inquilab, no true azadi ✊🏽✊🏽
so honoured to receive the class teacher awards with the inspiring
@LSEGenderTweet
colleagues at
@lsesu
teaching awards ceremony yesterday. big thanks to all our students for their kindness, generosity and learning spirit - always in awe, always grateful!
important thread on how settler colonial and occupier states dehumanise occupied people’s bodies - in life and death - and affective ties with space. so, all resistance becomes ‘terrorism’ or ‘real estate dispute’. death to all occupations from Palestine to Kashmir.
I've been thinking about the Israeli Foreign Ministry calling the continuing Nakba in Shaikh Jarrah "a real estate dispute". Setting aside its derisive attempt at diminishing the violence of Israeli security apparatuses (including settlers) & belittling Palestinian resistance 1/
since we are on it, books on decolonial feminisms that i keep learning a great deal from:
A decolonial feminism by Françoise Vergès, Pilgrimages/peregrinajes by María Lugones.
also, Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith & Dancing on my Turtle’s back by Leanne Simpson
Some of us at
@LSEGenderTweet
have put together a day conference to think through feminist politics in times of social uprisings as we continue to see anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian protests the world over. Artists, activists, scholars, we invite you to send us your proposals
CfP for our annual in-person workshop on ‘Anti-imperial feminist architectures of resistance’ on 5 Dec.
if you work on gender, race, sexuality, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, de/anti/postcolonial and feminist thought, write to us at cpd.group
@bisa
.ac.uk by 1 November.
🚨CfP for our Annual Workshop🚨on 'Anti-imperial feminist architectures of resistance'
The workshop will take place on 5 Dec 2024 in London followed by a public roundtable with anticolonial queer feminist thinkers & organisers. Details on workshop themes & submissions below:
Irrfan’s loss feels so personal, so deeply real, and so devastating. those eyes, the ठेहराव he embodied in every moment on screen and in his interviews will remain unmatched. feel incredibly lucky to have had experienced his art.
solidarity scholarship can never be about withholding accountability, transparency with interlocutors. when we are dangerously close to power, it’s worth rethinking the questions we ask, from whom, to what ends. solidarity is nothing without asking difficult questions of oneself.
I write about undertaking anti-colonial feminist solidarity work, the many disjunctures and complexities that arise out of our specific social location and political investments. Specifically, thinking through Kashmir and urban Indian feminist politics:
all thoughts with Natasha Narwal today. can’t bear to imagine losing one’s surviving parent, a spirited father like hers to covid, and a fascist state disallowing her from being with him in life and death. fascists are breaking us and destroying lives in innumerable ways 💔
we (
@LSEengenderings
) are seeking NEW submissions for our special series 'location: interrupted'. all forms of submissions: poetry, photo essays, narrative pieces that think through location and interruptions (in their plural meanings) in the pandemic context are very welcome.
We are excited to launch our special series 'Location: Interrupted' that seeks to reflect on how the pandemic has altered & interrupted the experience of location (conceived broadly building on feminist, queer of colour, anti-racist, trans scholarship). We invite submissions +
the first time i read All About Love, i just couldn’t forget this phrase which bell hooks wrote about. it was graffitied on a wall she used to walk by until one day when it wasn’t. like her, i too hope to live by them:
the search for love continues even in the face of great odds
on Kashmiri women’s resistance day,
@SamreenMushtaq_
writes for
@LSEengenderings
on songs of resistance, their memory-making potential, and how they sew the past, present and future:
with many of us rethinking our research design and more importantly, what feminist engagements and scholarship can look like in these deeply uncertain times,
@FeministReview_
has made this important issue on feminist methods free to download here:
in this essay, I reflect on pandemic-as-war narrative, how it widens existing socio-political inequalities and creates conditions for militarism to flourish. on the
@project_polis
after months of collective organising, we are happy to announce our speakers (artists, academics, activists, collectives) for 'A World in Revolution' conference on june 10 and 11, 2021
@LSEGenderTweet
@LSEMiddleEast
in colonised zones/under coloniality, i fail to understand how feminist research can be undertaken ‘without taking sides’. wouldn’t reflexivity and accounting for locational/political/ethical complexities necessitate that we align against oppressive power - and make this clear?
news of death after death. people are dying like flies. families begging for freezers to keep bodies from rotting until funeral because this is peak summer. others paying thousands for private ambulances. never before has the dread, anger, pain, helplessness been so magnified.
colour of your skin, being reduced to flesh & stripped of humanity is what determines where, on whom wars are waged, how “just & civilised” they’re, public rage they garner & who is allowed to flee war.
no conditional solidarity but Europe must take a long hard look at itself.
Insurgent Knowledges is an anticolonial feminist collective that
@AjeebAurat
and i run. this Sat (24 Aug from 11-2 BST) we are organising a hybrid workshop on 'Unpacking India’s new criminal laws from a civil liberties perspective' with Md Afeef. register:
after conceptualising this last year, we put a pause when the pandemic hit us; a pause we wanted to sit with & unpack from an anti-colonial feminist standpoint. and in that hope, we're happy to share this one-day online conference 'A World in Revolution'
What a thought provoking and powerful lecture by Prof Niraja Gopal Jayal on citizenship in India and the propensity of the recent amendment to formalising exclusion through the law.
@LSEGenderTweet
@purpleremnants
@Nidhi
Also, akin to saying:
'You may not agree with fascists, and if you don’t, don’t listen to them. Heckling them on a flight is not justified.'
The irony.
an inspiring and urgent read.
‘Such a radical transformation of whitestream feminism and gender and women's studies is both possible and desirable. In the end, decolonizing feminism in this manner is an important step toward…pushing what feminism could mean, for all peoples...’
To our feminist sisters, mothers and comrades guiding us all the way to an anti-fascist dawn.
#ShaheenBagh
#StandWithJNU
Rough translation from Hindi: Jamia girls have shown us the way. The women of Shaheen Bagh have taught us how to live.
have been stunned at how short-lived dominant public memory is in India. we forget the violence inflicted on marginalised peoples, the colonial politics of the nation-state, the people who have died because of state failures... & here we are in the throes of fascism, celebrating!
this might sound a bit snarky but all of us can record our extremely stressful experiences of emotional abuse in the coterie of elite Indian urban 'feminist/social justice' NGOs and hope that young womxn no longer have to be at the receiving end of it.
PARTICIPATE IN RESERACH: Have you experienced or encountered emotional workplace abuse? We are looking for participants to share their experiences and perceptions anonymously regarding emotional abuse in the workplace. You can take part in the study here:
despite the toughest of circumstances, it is feminist spaces, teachers, scholars, students, comrades, mothers and friends who nourish and sustain us, and who i continue to learn (and hope to never stop learning) from. grateful beyond words 🙏🏽✊🏽🌟
i write on home & dismantling its exclusionary borders laid bare by the pandemic. perhaps it is time to collectivise & build a bridge (or many) that will help envision a world of equality, care & love. part of
@FeministReview_
's confronting the household:
Gail Omvedt and María Lugones, two scholars I learn so much from, think similarly about utopia not as a simple task of imagination but real, material, inhabited worlds that already exist and inspire anti-caste, cross border revolutionary solidarities. a deep, deep loss indeed.
Gail Omvedt, rise in power! Her work on anti-caste movements, gender, & Dalit-Bahujan mobilisation is essential reading for anyone researching on India.
Her most characteristic writing appears in _Seeking Begumpura_. The engagement of utopia in the Indian context is remarkable.
very pleased to share that a project
@AjeebAurat
and i have been dreaming of is finally taking shape: Insurgent Knowledges, a work-in-progress public education collective that dreams of free knowledge and critical exchange for all. all info here:
however, careful historical work like
@sepoy
’s The Loss of Hindustan where he thinks about colonial epistemology & its erasure by going back to Farishta’s accounts is stellar. until non-Brahmin/hindu, Dalit, adivasi scholarship is centred, decolonial will be abused by fascists.
what beautiful moments of solidarity & collective energy at
@LSE_UCU
! strikers reading revolutionary poetry by Pash (my fav - sabse khatarnak hota hai), Bhagat Singh & Faiz’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’ brought me to tears.
#OneOfUsAllOfUs
‘this is necessary because we will not triumph alone’
in this particular political moment in India and what the state is doing in Kashmir, any form of liberatory politics - especially feminist politics - grounded in anti-colonial, anti-oppressive principles cannot flourish without calling an end to occupation.
occupation is both deeply vicious and spineless. arresting those speaking truth to power under 'waging war against the state' and 'terrorism' while using necropolitical tools like the dreadful UAPA.
#FreeKhurramParvez
reading revolutionary feminisms where Gail Lewis quotes Ambalavaner Sivanandan on "making an individual/local case into an issue, turning issues into causes and causes into movements and building in the process a new political culture"
timely lesson on research &/as vulnerability
yes, we are angry and in despair but important to not rehearse pandemic-as-war and other military metaphors. none of those who have died were expendable but have been materially made and unjustly framed so.
post-fieldwork musings: so many of the ‘canonical’ concepts within western political theory and philosophy, even critical theorisations because they are written in the English language, can hardly grasp the complexities of everyday life & lived realities in our third worlds.
@Jairo_I_Funez
thinking of Cusicanqui’s critique of the GN academy stalwarts of decolonial thinking and what citational, epistemic erasures are enacted.
📢We have two vacancies for 2-year fellowships in Gender, Rights & Human Rights and Gender, Development & Globalisation.
Please share with your networks and note the August 9th application deadline!
imho, reading gender into the nidhi razdan fiasco is a classic paranoid reading. yes, womxn are trolled, phised, harassed so much more - and in no way am I underplaying that but this particular case is of privilege - bypassing job processes, visa regimes, CLASS & social capital.
every moment i spend in India i am reminded of why i deeply detest the institution of marriage, its sociality and heterosexist family structures that bind and are reproduced by it. so much of it is what women cannot and should not do, ugh!
binary gender, its ascription ‘at present, chromosomes and genitalia enter into the assignment, but in a manner that reveals biology is thoroughly interpreted and itself surgically constructed’, its snatching away, all scream bourgeoisie, white, colonial vulnerabilities.
Hindutva as a political movement became concretised during British colonisation of the subcontinent. put simply, it remains riven with coloniality of power, especially how the Indian state functions so there is no way Hindutva - theoretically, politically - can ever be decolonial
love love love this panel from
@LSEGenderTweet
conceptual diversity workshop, especially
@mahvishahmad
's intervention on maintaining a reciprocal relationship with movements, an 'actual relationship' of political intimacy which goes well beyond the academy.
In about 30 minutes, I will be presenting a short, 10-minute talk called: "Shaoor, Nazriyat, Zameer: On Political Clarity from
#Balochistan
to
#Palestine
."
Join us!
everything Mariya said here! what a complete lack of political understanding of anti-imperialism, social histories of struggle and solidarity & the disgusting desperation to become part of the imperial core. we need organised resistance against ALL colonial desires/power.
india is such a stellar example of why the postcolonial is not decolonial. Less than a few decades after “gaining” their own independence their is a complete erasure of the collective memory of what imperialism is what solidarity means who the aggressors are what is colonialism
azadi to live a dignified life & thrive in community. azadi is feminist azadi, queer azadi, trans azadi. azadi is annihilation of caste. azadi to occupied peoples. azadi from hate, religious supremacy, fascism, borders. azadi so we can love grow heal together. inquilabi azadi ✊🏽
for so many, occupied and colonised contexts, geographies inflicted with state and imperial violence are just research agendas… and it shows in the language, the framing, the self-centeredness and the silences, of course.
on my way to Wimbledon yesterday, not sure who were more horrid & scary: the english football fans or anti-vaxxers anti-science 'protestors' heckling us for wearing masks (a man screamed - BREATHE FRESH AIR). both groups inflicting and thriving on gendered and racist violence.
which is why i use decolonial with caution, especially as a researcher-person from the subcontinent, on how easily it can be co-opted by Hindutva. they have long been peddling dewesternisation as a return to mythic Indic past.
universities acting like vicious brokers of imperial states... this is where neoliberal models of education devoid of any radical praxis or work towards collective, anti-imperial justice have led us.
looking forward to this brilliant event with stellar speakers! others interested in postcolonial, decolonial and intersectional feminist conversations in LDN, let's go together?
also ‘nation’ as a gendered space and imaginary like the household where the patriarch is always right, not open to challenging. thinking of the desi family trope as the bedrock of the nation, the silence (shh, this is a ‘private’ matter) and violence it perpetuates.
Apart from the fact that govt has showcased its control over celebs - have you noticed how none of their tweets actually mean anything? Everyone is just like
#IndiaTogether
.. like okk Karan but means what? Is it a new rich family drama where bauji is right but wrong but right.
last week I had the privilege & honour of listening to & learning from Arturo Escobar in person and his generous thinking.
he stated how deeply un-caring & stifling of radical kindness western/modern/liberal spaces including (& especially) the academy can be. important lessons!
for south asians, building solidarity with Black people requires addressing anti-Blackness in our own communities and fierce refusal of 'model minority' categorisations that ultimately reaffirm whiteness.
via
@project_polis
listening to (the) Sherene H. Razack, the 2024
@ftgs_isa
eminent scholar who centres Palestine and the genocide in Gaza to make us think about the role of feminist scholars in the face of a people being decimated.
thanks also to
@mghacademic
and
@agathang1
for their brilliance.
Join us, The Rising Majority, on April 2 for a Left feminist analysis of the COVID19 crisis with Angela Davis & Naomi Klein. Register now for this important webinar on Movement Building in a time of crisis.
‘the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.’
saddened to hear about the passing of prof Malathi de Alwis. today and everyday, thinking of and learning from her excellent feminist scholarship on militarism, violence and memorialisation in SL/SAsia. indeed, a profound loss for those of us invested in anti-militarist praxis.