The latest episode of the Imagine Otherwise podcast is live! I interview queer diaspora studies scholar Gayatri Gopinath about how visual culture allows us to draw alternative cartographies and see things queerly, how diasporic communities are using art to challenge national governments and transnational capitalism, the radical possibilities of region-to-region connections across the Global South, and why mentoring queer scholars of color is such a vital part of how Gayatri imagines otherwise
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You can also read the transcript and show notes on the Ideas on Fire website, which have links to Gayatri’s work and all the concepts, people, and events we discuss on the show (great for teaching!).
Guest: Gayatri Gopinath
Gayatri Gopinath is an associate professor of social and cultural analysis as well as the director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. She works at the intersections of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies.
She’s also the author of the book Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, which was published by Duke University Press.
Gayatri’s new book is called Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora and will be out in November 2018 by Duke University Press.
Gayatri’s scholarship on gender, sexuality, and queer diasporic cultural production has been published in the journals GLQ, Social Text, positions, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Diaspora, as well as the edited collections The Sun Never Sets: South Asians in the Age of US Empire, Political Emotions, and The Blackwell Companion to LGBT Studies.
Key quote
“What would it mean to live your life knowing that your life is radically bound up, intimately bound up, with those who seem so distant from you? I think you’d have to move in a really different way, make really different decisions in your life. I think that’s the beauty of the art that I’m looking at—it forces us to grapple with that radical relationality.”
– Gayatri Gopinath on episode 69 of the Imagine Otherwise podcast
