National (un)Belonging: Bengali American Women on Imagining and Contesting Culture and Identity

Friday, April 11, 2025 | 6pm to 7:30pm

25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Suite 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

In-Person: RSVP |  Zoom: RSVP

Much queer theory in America is based on white male experience and privilege, excluding people of color and severely limiting its relevance to third-world activism. Within the last three decades,  chronicles from gay lesbian bisexual transgender intersex queer (GLBTIQ) communities within the South Asian diaspora in the United States have appeared, but the richness and contradictions that characterize these communities have been stifled. Too often, the limitations due to undertheorized South Asian American lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual histories—compounded by a queer canon overwrought with the East/West and tradition/modern equations—render queer South Asian Americans as a monolithic homogeneous category with little or no agency.

In this talk, Dr. Roksana Badruddoja visits paradoxes, difficulties, unity, and diversity by unraveling the lives of two second-generation gender-queer South Asian American folx, Rupa and Ronica. They show us ways in which an often invisible and marginalized group accepts, manipulates, and resists hegemonic powers. A core question Dr. Badruddoja advances in her research is how can historically disenfranchised lives be animated and made to interrupt binaried discourses? She answers the question by offering an embodied theorization of an assemblage of multiple saberes or knowings that avoid the traps of binary discourses. One of the ways she accomplishes this is by offering ethnographic work as a compelling narrative and theorization of decoloniality.

Purchase Book: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/