Discussing Queerness from the South Asian Context
FEMINIST THINKING SERIES 2024: Dr. J. Daniel Luther
Friday, 9 February 2024, 1.30pm-2.30pm
Okinaga Board Room, Wadham College
Free but registrations required.
Dr. J. Daniel Luther is an independent academic working in the fields of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Post-colonial, Critical Race, and Cultural Studies. They are a co-founder of 'Queer' Asia. Having left the academic precariat, they now wear multiple hats working on building nurturing spaces for young scholars in higher education at Oxford University as the Associate Programme Director of the Rhodes Scholarship. They lecture at the LSE, SOAS, and in universities in India and Singapore. They also work in the field of DEI as an Associate Consultant at Delta. They serve on the board of the UK Asian Film Festival, Britain's oldest Asian Film Festival.
Their recent publication, ‘Queering Normativity and South Asian Public Culture: Wrong Readings Only’, discusses the nuances of queer subjecthood and the impact normativity has on moulding gender and sexuality in a South Asian context. The work is a deep dive into questioning naturalized aspects of South Asian public culture to unravel the constructions of canon, nation, the woman as a post-colonial subject, and same-sex sexuality. We look forward to hosting Dr Luther to discuss this work and its research process at length, with an emphasis on global academia’s recognition of queerness from the South Asian context.
This is our very first seminar for the Feminist Thinking Series 2024! The Feminist Thinking Seminar series is curated by the graduate students in the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, which takes place between February and June 2024. At each seminar, speakers present and discuss a topic related to feminist/queer/trans theory and its practice. Our goal for this series is to create inclusive events which may motivate us to re-imagine the reality we live in. We want to engage in a dialogue that allows us to rethink and propose new ways of allowing greater equality for women, trans people, people of colour, LGBTIQ+ people and other groups that have less power in society. The term ‘feminist thinking’ is up for interpretation - part of our goal is not to decide what feminist thinking is but rather ask what it could be.
Intersectional Humanities
