Nishant Shahani
Biographic Data
| ID | 287032 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nishant Shahani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nishant |
| FAMILY NAME | Shahani |
| SIGNATURE | SHAHANI N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Washington State University Vancouver |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4242-8462 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
To Desire Differently: Contagion, Occupation, and the Threading of Crises
In December 2023 nonbinary indigenous playwright Victor I. Cazares posted the following message on their Instagram page: “On this World AIDS day, I am going to stop taking my HIV meds until New York Theatre Workshop calls for a Ceasefire.”1 Cazares thereafter began their protest against the off-Broadway theater organization for remaining silent on the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Israel’s war on Gaza, despite the organization’s putative inve…
Autoimmunities after Covid: An Interview with Cindy Patton
Cindy Patton is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. An early AIDS activist in Boston, she holds a PhD in Communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After inaugurating her academic career at Temple University (Rhetoric and Community) and Emory University (Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts), she accepted a Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture and Health at …
Introduction: Autoimmunities in the Wake of Covid-19
Our introduction and the essays collected in this Special Section address themselves to the ruins, creations, and legacies of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, we ask how our notions of immunity and especially autoimmunity have changed over the last three years. We theorize autoimmunity in the wake of COVID-19 through approaches that consider the material and experiential phenomenology proliferated by the longue durée of both the exp…
Empire's Calculus in the Queer and Now
In reflecting on the first decade of QED's significance, I want to return to its title as a provocation to think about the present and future. As the journal's co-founders theorize, the “QED” in the title is deliberately ambivalent, allowing for possibilities that are capacious and that signify differently across various contexts. The “Q” in the title “resonates queerly” if indeterminately, allowing it “to be playful, productive, propulsive.” But…
Views from above and below: Bridging scenes of difference
This article focuses on the vertical visioning of the bridge as a visual icon of the global city in urban planning, specifically the Bandra-Worli sea link in Mumbai. The author contends that the sea link, launched in 2019 as a way to connect the southern part of the city with its western suburbs, participates in aerial visual significations in which views from above partake in framing of the urban metropolis as an essential aspect of the nation-s…
Global in Spirit”: Deep Reading Transgenre
In this article, I theorize the notion of “transgenre” in which “trans” indexes multiple possibilities: i.e., an analysis of transgender cultural production through the more explicitly mediated logics of transnational racial capitalism. To ground these investments, I read the Netflix show Sense8 as a cultural text that mines these multiple meanings of “trans.” My analysis suggests that the show's investment in corporeal transgression shimmers ove…
Aids and the Distribution of Crises
Queer intimacy during seditious times: Revisiting the case of Ramchandra Siras
In this essay, I theorize a relation between sexual and caste politics to consider the interfacing between two suicides on university campuses that made public headlines for different reasons: the Dalit student Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad, and the gay Marathi professor, Ramchandra Siras at Aligarh Muslim University. In analyzing these two cases together, I want to ask what it might mean to retrospectively re-think Siras’ case thr…
Patently Queer
In 1998 the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis filed a writ petition against the Indian government to prevent local drug manufacturers from producing generic HIV and cancer medications. Rather than framing queer politics in India as a matter of state-sanctioned citizenship in which queers rally for legal rights, "Patently Queer: Late Effects and the Sexual Economies of India" considers this case of Novartis AG v. Union of India as a kind of se…
How to Survive the Whitewashing of Aids: Global Pasts, Transnational Futures
In this paper, I critique contemporary AIDS narratives of historiographic heroism that flatten the complex legacy of intersectional and transnational labor across coalitional lines. I ground my arguments about AIDS gentrification through a critique of the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012) not simply to offer a “corrective” account of AIDS history that fills in missing gaps, but to intervene into the representational terms of AIDS histori…
I Have a Voice: Speech, Silence and the Rehabilitation of Empire
This article grapples with the performativity of speech as a crucial site through which empire brings into being that which it names. I offer a critique of reading (and rehabilitating) empire as a mild and benign force in conjunction with the popularity of the film The King’s Speech (2010) which, I argue, attaches a humanized and redeemed face to the violence of empire. In my analysis, I suggest that a film that is ostensibly about the triumph of…
Between Light and Nowhere”: The Queer Politics of Nostalgia
The Future Is Queer Stuff
In this review, I consider recent works by José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia), Judith (Jack) Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure), and Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (If Memory Serves) as investments in the politics of queer futurity. Collectively, I analyze these works as offering both theoretical mobilizations of and departures from traditions of critical utopianism. Analyzed together, they explicitly challenge theories of queer …
After the Fire: India Is Burning
Book Review| January 01 2009 After the Fire: India Is Burning The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya, eds. Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2007. xxxii + 496 pp. Nishant Shahani Nishant Shahani Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2009) 15 (1): 180–182. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedI…
Between Light and Nowhere”: The Queer Politics of Nostalgia
The Future Is Queer Stuff
In this review, I consider recent works by José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia), Judith (Jack) Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure), and Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (If Memory Serves) as investments in the politics of queer futurity. Collectively, I analyze these works as offering both theoretical mobilizations of and departures from traditions of critical utopianism. Analyzed together, they explicitly challenge theories of queer …
How to Survive the Whitewashing of Aids: Global Pasts, Transnational Futures
In this paper, I critique contemporary AIDS narratives of historiographic heroism that flatten the complex legacy of intersectional and transnational labor across coalitional lines. I ground my arguments about AIDS gentrification through a critique of the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012) not simply to offer a “corrective” account of AIDS history that fills in missing gaps, but to intervene into the representational terms of AIDS histori…
Patently Queer
In 1998 the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis filed a writ petition against the Indian government to prevent local drug manufacturers from producing generic HIV and cancer medications. Rather than framing queer politics in India as a matter of state-sanctioned citizenship in which queers rally for legal rights, "Patently Queer: Late Effects and the Sexual Economies of India" considers this case of Novartis AG v. Union of India as a kind of se…
I Have a Voice: Speech, Silence and the Rehabilitation of Empire
This article grapples with the performativity of speech as a crucial site through which empire brings into being that which it names. I offer a critique of reading (and rehabilitating) empire as a mild and benign force in conjunction with the popularity of the film The King’s Speech (2010) which, I argue, attaches a humanized and redeemed face to the violence of empire. In my analysis, I suggest that a film that is ostensibly about the triumph of…
After the Fire: India Is Burning
Book Review| January 01 2009 After the Fire: India Is Burning The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics of Sexualities in Contemporary India Brinda Bose and Subhabrata Bhattacharyya, eds. Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2007. xxxii + 496 pp. Nishant Shahani Nishant Shahani Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2009) 15 (1): 180–182. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedI…
Between Light and Nowhere”: The Queer Politics of Nostalgia
The Future Is Queer Stuff
In this review, I consider recent works by José Esteban Muñoz (Cruising Utopia), Judith (Jack) Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure), and Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (If Memory Serves) as investments in the politics of queer futurity. Collectively, I analyze these works as offering both theoretical mobilizations of and departures from traditions of critical utopianism. Analyzed together, they explicitly challenge theories of queer …
I Have a Voice: Speech, Silence and the Rehabilitation of Empire
This article grapples with the performativity of speech as a crucial site through which empire brings into being that which it names. I offer a critique of reading (and rehabilitating) empire as a mild and benign force in conjunction with the popularity of the film The King’s Speech (2010) which, I argue, attaches a humanized and redeemed face to the violence of empire. In my analysis, I suggest that a film that is ostensibly about the triumph of…
How to Survive the Whitewashing of Aids: Global Pasts, Transnational Futures
In this paper, I critique contemporary AIDS narratives of historiographic heroism that flatten the complex legacy of intersectional and transnational labor across coalitional lines. I ground my arguments about AIDS gentrification through a critique of the documentary How to Survive a Plague (2012) not simply to offer a “corrective” account of AIDS history that fills in missing gaps, but to intervene into the representational terms of AIDS histori…
Patently Queer
In 1998 the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis filed a writ petition against the Indian government to prevent local drug manufacturers from producing generic HIV and cancer medications. Rather than framing queer politics in India as a matter of state-sanctioned citizenship in which queers rally for legal rights, "Patently Queer: Late Effects and the Sexual Economies of India" considers this case of Novartis AG v. Union of India as a kind of se…
Queer intimacy during seditious times: Revisiting the case of Ramchandra Siras
In this essay, I theorize a relation between sexual and caste politics to consider the interfacing between two suicides on university campuses that made public headlines for different reasons: the Dalit student Rohith Vemula at the University of Hyderabad, and the gay Marathi professor, Ramchandra Siras at Aligarh Muslim University. In analyzing these two cases together, I want to ask what it might mean to retrospectively re-think Siras’ case thr…
Aids and the Distribution of Crises
Views from above and below: Bridging scenes of difference
This article focuses on the vertical visioning of the bridge as a visual icon of the global city in urban planning, specifically the Bandra-Worli sea link in Mumbai. The author contends that the sea link, launched in 2019 as a way to connect the southern part of the city with its western suburbs, participates in aerial visual significations in which views from above partake in framing of the urban metropolis as an essential aspect of the nation-s…
Global in Spirit”: Deep Reading Transgenre
In this article, I theorize the notion of “transgenre” in which “trans” indexes multiple possibilities: i.e., an analysis of transgender cultural production through the more explicitly mediated logics of transnational racial capitalism. To ground these investments, I read the Netflix show Sense8 as a cultural text that mines these multiple meanings of “trans.” My analysis suggests that the show's investment in corporeal transgression shimmers ove…
Autoimmunities after Covid: An Interview with Cindy Patton
Cindy Patton is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. An early AIDS activist in Boston, she holds a PhD in Communications from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. After inaugurating her academic career at Temple University (Rhetoric and Community) and Emory University (Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts), she accepted a Canada Research Chair in Community, Culture and Health at …
Introduction: Autoimmunities in the Wake of Covid-19
Our introduction and the essays collected in this Special Section address themselves to the ruins, creations, and legacies of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. More precisely, we ask how our notions of immunity and especially autoimmunity have changed over the last three years. We theorize autoimmunity in the wake of COVID-19 through approaches that consider the material and experiential phenomenology proliferated by the longue durée of both the exp…
Empire's Calculus in the Queer and Now
In reflecting on the first decade of QED's significance, I want to return to its title as a provocation to think about the present and future. As the journal's co-founders theorize, the “QED” in the title is deliberately ambivalent, allowing for possibilities that are capacious and that signify differently across various contexts. The “Q” in the title “resonates queerly” if indeterminately, allowing it “to be playful, productive, propulsive.” But…
To Desire Differently: Contagion, Occupation, and the Threading of Crises
In December 2023 nonbinary indigenous playwright Victor I. Cazares posted the following message on their Instagram page: “On this World AIDS day, I am going to stop taking my HIV meds until New York Theatre Workshop calls for a Ceasefire.”1 Cazares thereafter began their protest against the off-Broadway theater organization for remaining silent on the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Israel’s war on Gaza, despite the organization’s putative inve…
Queer (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Politics (6 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Art (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works)