Divas, Drag Queens, Aunties, and Other Academic Personas

Where the scholar’s body is often obscured in preference for their mind, evacuating the body from academic labor is a luxury rarely available to queer people of color. This talk explores the possibilities of self-fashioning in the academy for minoritarian subjects. Tracing his trajectory across various intellectual projects—queer South Asian nightlife, global drag, representations of the aunty—Kareem Khubchandani explores the co-constitutive relationships between research, teaching, and artistry, between ethnography, analysis, pedagogy, and performance.

Kareem Khubchandani is the author of the award-winning books Decolonize Drag and Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. He is also co-editor of the Lambda Literary-nominated Queer Nightlife, guest editor of Text and Performance Quarterly’s “Critical Aunty Studies,” and associate editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Kareem is Associate Professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University and FO Matthiessen Visiting Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. His new book, Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties is now out from Brandeis University Press.