1st Edition

COVID-19 Assemblages Queer and Feminist Ethnographies from South Asia

Edited By Niharika Banerjea, Paul Boyce, Rohit K. Dasgupta Copyright 2022
208 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

208 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

208 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge India

This book documents and analyzes the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic through queer and feminist perspectives. A testament of dispossessions as well as a celebration of various forms of resilience, community building and critical responses, it chronicles the social history of queer and trans persons and women in South Asia and the diasporas. Through a creative and collaborative form of... Read more

Notes on the Contributors

Foreword by Jasbir K. Puar

 

Acknowledgements

I: Introduction

Niharika Banerjea, Paul Boyce and Rohit K Dasgupta

II: Testaments, Memories, Epistemic Terrains

1 Looming

Santa Khurai

2 Transnational Entanglements of Geopolitical, Pandemic and Intimate Citizenship

Dhiren Borisa and Gavin Brown

3 House maids, Urban Spacing and Negotiating the ‘Other’ During Covid Times

Amrita Ghosh

4 Reimaging the Migrant in the Time of the Pandemic

Darshana S. Mini and Anirban K. Baishya

5 The Forbidden Word _ the life during COVID 19

Moshfec Ara

6 Fragmented Realities of the Pandemic: The Multiple Marginalities of Disabled People in India

Nandini Ghosh

7 Desi Woman and Higher Education in the UK: Affect and Effect of Covid-19 

Rittika Dasgupta and Naseeba Umar

8 Queer Patchworks: Liveability, Creative Work and Survival in the time of COVID

Rohit K Dasgupta

9 Untitled: I Am Still Becoming

[Kya title bolon? Main tho abhi bhi badal rahan hoon]

Tripta Chandola

10 Remembering COVID-19

Paul Boyce and Raina Roy

11 Metaphor of contagion: The impact of Covid-19 on the Hijras in Bangladesh

Adnan Hossain

III: Un-belonging, Survival, Resistance

12 Stateless Beings

Danny Coyle

13 The Pandemic and Us – Thoughts on Queer Living and Building Social Connections

Poushali, Madhurima, Koyel, Reshmi, Archee, Kolika, Debika

14 Queer in Transit – (Un)settlement and Precarity in Times of COVID-19

Debjyoti Ghosh

15 From #dalitlivesmatters to #mysatyagraha: Nepali Transnational Youth Activism during the Covid-19 pandemic

Premila van Ommen

16 Pandemic Life of Sexual and Gender Minorities of Sri Lanka

Thiyagaraja Waradas

17 Virus that Does not Discriminate but a System that Does: Gender [X] Pakistan

Hena Ali and Rubban Shakeel

18 A Home-in-Making: Risk, Longing and Responsibility in Lockdown

Niharika Banerjea and Sumita Beethi

19 Of Epidemics and Queer Friendships from Manipur in India.

Kumam Davidson

20 Untitled

Queer Rights Collective, Nepal

Index

Biography

Niharika Banerjea is Associate Professor in the School of Liberal Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi.

Paul Boyce is Reader in Anthropology at the University of Sussex.

Rohit K Dasgupta is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Industries at the University of Glasgow and Commissioner for Social Integration and Equalities in the London Borough of Newham.

 

'COVID-19 Assemblages provides timely and critical insight on how the pandemic has produced incisive scholarship on gender, sexuality and health during a global crisis. Bringing together a broad range of interdisciplinary scholarship the book sheds important light on the struggle to find the means to represent intimacy, collaboration and empowerment during a time of enforced social distancing, alienation and isolation.'

Joseph Alter, Professor of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh.

'COVID-19 Assemblages is one of the first anthologies that examines the pandemic ethnographically. Offering a remarkable set of quotidian and critical perspectives on the severely exacerbated modes of stratification and precarity that ordinary people have met with extraordinary grace, this book is a testament to unfolding possibilities of ethnographic critique and patchwork assemblages deployed through the prism of queer feminism.' 

Svati Shah, Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst.