Kareem Khubchandani
Biographic Data
| ID | 287034 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kareem Khubchandani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kareem |
| FAMILY NAME | Khubchandani |
| SIGNATURE | KHUBCHANDANI K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tufts University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1841-2030 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Craig Jennex, Liberation on the Dance Floor: Popular Music and the Promise of Plurality
Craig Jennex, Liberation on the Dance Floor: Popular Music and the Promise of Plurality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 80 pp. ISBN 9781009351812 (hbk).In Liberation on the Dance Floor, Jennex draws on archival and oral historical research to make apparent the role of music and dance in the gay liberation movement in North America, particularly between the 1960s and 80s. He demonstrates that the social, aesthetic, and affective work…
LeAnn Fields and University of Michigan Press
In 1987, LeAnn Fields acquired Lynda Hart‘s Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. By the time Fields retired in 2024, she had built a list of more than 280 books in the field of theatre and performance studies at the University of Michigan Press. Hart’s Making a Spectacle is a foundational and still radical book of critical essays on gender, the body, and spectatorship, topics that continue to chart and reverberate …
The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies
Performance, with Kareem Khubchandani
From Shakespeare to RuPaul, we all love a performance.But what exactly is it?What are its boundaries, its powers, its potential, its stakes?Kareem Khubchandani, who also performs as LaWhore Vagistan -"everyone's favourite desi drag queen aunty" -joins Uncommon Sense to unpack the latest thinking on refusal, repetition and more.And to discuss "Ishtyle", Kareem's ethnography of gay Indian nightlife in Chicago and Bangalore, which attends to desire …
Decolonize Drag
Introduction: Transnational Figurations of the South Asian Aunty
Thanks also to Mhairi Montgomery, Kama Maclean, the South Asia editorial board, and the Taylor and Francis team—you made a daunting project feel enjoyable. This project emerges from the virtual Critical Aunty Studies symposium at Tufts University, funded by a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant that my colleagues, Dr. Sarah Pinto and Dr. Kendra Field, won, titled 'Defamiliarizing the Family: Genealogy and Kinship as Critical Method'—thank you both to the…
Sculpting Queer Futures for Survival: Jaishri Abichandani's Everyday Deities
Working in photography, sculpture, mixed media portraiture, and protest performance, New York-based artist Jaishri Abichandani archives her feminist, queer, and trans South Asian community. In her early work, she photographed drag artists and genderqueer performers at desi parties in the early 2000s, and in a series of ongoing portraits titled Jasmine Blooms at Night she paints tributary portraits of South Asian cultural and political workers (ar…
Critical aunty studies: An auntroduction
Though aunties are ubiquitous figures across global public cultures, they have received limited scholarly attention. Given the location of these women, femme, and queer figures at the periphery of nuclear families, it is little surprise that they are overlooked. Rather than fixate on their marginality, this introduction demonstrates how aunties become abundant figures to think kinship, desire, aesthetics, and politics. Examining academic and arts…
Cyborgs Unbound: Feminist STS, Interdisciplinarity, and Graduate Education
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality’s (GCWS) series Feminisms Unbound. The introduction maps the history and structure of the GCWS series and highlights how its rigorous commitment to interdisciplinary graduate education fosters feminist science and technology studies (STS) i…
Between aunties: Sexual futures and queer South Asian aunty porn
The aunty appears as a common vernacular figure in South Asian film, television, memes, novels, and porn. ‘Aunty porn’ names a large body of pornography that features fat, older, South Asian women; this genre is unique in that it features aunties as protagonists. In other media, aunties are only afforded minor roles as difficult, stubborn, and traditional, and this archetype positions them as an antagonist to queer sexual futures. This article sc…
Micah Salkind, Do You Remember House: Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds
Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife
Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of "ishtyle" to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves…
Dance Floor Divas: Fieldwork, Fabulating and Fathoming in Queer Bangalore
Tracing his encounters with one particular song during fieldwork on queer nightlife in Bangalore, the author argues for the usefulness of ethnography as a critical method for studying dance and other modes of fun, play and pleasure in South Asia. He argues that ethnography’s many modes (co-performance, interview, observation, auto-ethnography) evidence how expressive practices integrate into the multiple strata of everyday life and political-econ…
Intimacies
Intimacy suggests closeness, proximity, even entanglement. In my research on queer nightlife, I found the spaces I worked in entangled in global politics such that people, feelings, and music from across the globe converged there, were in fact gathered there by the pushes and pulls of racial capitalism that bring diasporas into each others’ orbits
Queering Area Studies, Archives, and Aesthetics
Research Article| January 01 2020 Queering Area Studies, Archives, and Aesthetics Kareem Khubchandani Kareem Khubchandani Kareem Khubchandani is Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor of theater, dance, and performance studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Tufts University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2020) 26 (1): 206–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7929287 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Face…
Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea
Comic Performance in Pakistan: The Bhānd
Caste, Queerness, Migration and the Erotics of Activism: An Interview with Filmmaker Moses Tulasi
This hybrid essay-interview draws on the experiences of diasporic, queer, Dalit-OBC filmmaker Moses Tulasi to explore the mutually constitutive roles of sexuality, caste, migration, art, and activism. In March 2016, Tulasi was arrested on the University of Hyderabad grounds, amidst protests elicited by the death of Dalit graduate student Rohith Vemula; only eight years prior Tulasi was a married, closeted, apolitical “IT guy” living in Chicago’s …
Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora by Lalaie Ameeriar
Reviewed by: Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora by Lalaie Ameeriar Kareem Khubchandani (bio) Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora, by Lalaie Ameeriar. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. Vii + 207 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 978–0–8223–6316–3. “We overdress, we migrants. We care too much how we look to you. We get it wrong. ... We absorb information without asking ques…
Terrifying Performances: Black-Brown-Queer Borrowings in Loins of Punjab Presents
Otto and B.D.G., a black and desi gay couple in the film Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya, 2007), are an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their representation, they use a variety of black and South Asian performance styles to critique normative and disciplinary systems that surround them. This essay explores the unconventional ways through which Otto and B…
Staging Transgender Solidarities at Bangalore's Queer Pride
This essay analyzes narrative scenes and aesthetic choices in Because We Have a Voice Too, an activist play staged at Bangalore Pride 2012. By linking the experiences of hijras and transmen, the play enables solidarities across gender through an overarching critique of patriarchy. The connections made between FTM and MTF experiences evidences the challenges facing transmen, who are often left out of LGBT Indian discourses, and articulates hijra n…
Critical aunty studies: An auntroduction
Though aunties are ubiquitous figures across global public cultures, they have received limited scholarly attention. Given the location of these women, femme, and queer figures at the periphery of nuclear families, it is little surprise that they are overlooked. Rather than fixate on their marginality, this introduction demonstrates how aunties become abundant figures to think kinship, desire, aesthetics, and politics. Examining academic and arts…
The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies
Dance Floor Divas: Fieldwork, Fabulating and Fathoming in Queer Bangalore
Tracing his encounters with one particular song during fieldwork on queer nightlife in Bangalore, the author argues for the usefulness of ethnography as a critical method for studying dance and other modes of fun, play and pleasure in South Asia. He argues that ethnography’s many modes (co-performance, interview, observation, auto-ethnography) evidence how expressive practices integrate into the multiple strata of everyday life and political-econ…
Caste, Queerness, Migration and the Erotics of Activism: An Interview with Filmmaker Moses Tulasi
This hybrid essay-interview draws on the experiences of diasporic, queer, Dalit-OBC filmmaker Moses Tulasi to explore the mutually constitutive roles of sexuality, caste, migration, art, and activism. In March 2016, Tulasi was arrested on the University of Hyderabad grounds, amidst protests elicited by the death of Dalit graduate student Rohith Vemula; only eight years prior Tulasi was a married, closeted, apolitical “IT guy” living in Chicago’s …
Introduction: Transnational Figurations of the South Asian Aunty
Thanks also to Mhairi Montgomery, Kama Maclean, the South Asia editorial board, and the Taylor and Francis team—you made a daunting project feel enjoyable. This project emerges from the virtual Critical Aunty Studies symposium at Tufts University, funded by a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant that my colleagues, Dr. Sarah Pinto and Dr. Kendra Field, won, titled 'Defamiliarizing the Family: Genealogy and Kinship as Critical Method'—thank you both to the…
Staging Transgender Solidarities at Bangalore's Queer Pride
This essay analyzes narrative scenes and aesthetic choices in Because We Have a Voice Too, an activist play staged at Bangalore Pride 2012. By linking the experiences of hijras and transmen, the play enables solidarities across gender through an overarching critique of patriarchy. The connections made between FTM and MTF experiences evidences the challenges facing transmen, who are often left out of LGBT Indian discourses, and articulates hijra n…
Terrifying Performances: Black-Brown-Queer Borrowings in Loins of Punjab Presents
Otto and B.D.G., a black and desi gay couple in the film Loins of Punjab Presents (Manish Acharya, 2007), are an exceptional representation of interracial desire in South Asian diasporic cultural production. Beyond the novelty of their representation, they use a variety of black and South Asian performance styles to critique normative and disciplinary systems that surround them. This essay explores the unconventional ways through which Otto and B…
Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora by Lalaie Ameeriar
Reviewed by: Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora by Lalaie Ameeriar Kareem Khubchandani (bio) Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora, by Lalaie Ameeriar. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017. Vii + 207 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 978–0–8223–6316–3. “We overdress, we migrants. We care too much how we look to you. We get it wrong. ... We absorb information without asking ques…
Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea
Comic Performance in Pakistan: The Bhānd
Caste, Queerness, Migration and the Erotics of Activism: An Interview with Filmmaker Moses Tulasi
This hybrid essay-interview draws on the experiences of diasporic, queer, Dalit-OBC filmmaker Moses Tulasi to explore the mutually constitutive roles of sexuality, caste, migration, art, and activism. In March 2016, Tulasi was arrested on the University of Hyderabad grounds, amidst protests elicited by the death of Dalit graduate student Rohith Vemula; only eight years prior Tulasi was a married, closeted, apolitical “IT guy” living in Chicago’s …
Micah Salkind, Do You Remember House: Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds
Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife
Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of "ishtyle" to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves…
Dance Floor Divas: Fieldwork, Fabulating and Fathoming in Queer Bangalore
Tracing his encounters with one particular song during fieldwork on queer nightlife in Bangalore, the author argues for the usefulness of ethnography as a critical method for studying dance and other modes of fun, play and pleasure in South Asia. He argues that ethnography’s many modes (co-performance, interview, observation, auto-ethnography) evidence how expressive practices integrate into the multiple strata of everyday life and political-econ…
Intimacies
Intimacy suggests closeness, proximity, even entanglement. In my research on queer nightlife, I found the spaces I worked in entangled in global politics such that people, feelings, and music from across the globe converged there, were in fact gathered there by the pushes and pulls of racial capitalism that bring diasporas into each others’ orbits
Queering Area Studies, Archives, and Aesthetics
Research Article| January 01 2020 Queering Area Studies, Archives, and Aesthetics Kareem Khubchandani Kareem Khubchandani Kareem Khubchandani is Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor of theater, dance, and performance studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Tufts University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2020) 26 (1): 206–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7929287 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Face…
Cyborgs Unbound: Feminist STS, Interdisciplinarity, and Graduate Education
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality’s (GCWS) series Feminisms Unbound. The introduction maps the history and structure of the GCWS series and highlights how its rigorous commitment to interdisciplinary graduate education fosters feminist science and technology studies (STS) i…
Between aunties: Sexual futures and queer South Asian aunty porn
The aunty appears as a common vernacular figure in South Asian film, television, memes, novels, and porn. ‘Aunty porn’ names a large body of pornography that features fat, older, South Asian women; this genre is unique in that it features aunties as protagonists. In other media, aunties are only afforded minor roles as difficult, stubborn, and traditional, and this archetype positions them as an antagonist to queer sexual futures. This article sc…
Critical aunty studies: An auntroduction
Though aunties are ubiquitous figures across global public cultures, they have received limited scholarly attention. Given the location of these women, femme, and queer figures at the periphery of nuclear families, it is little surprise that they are overlooked. Rather than fixate on their marginality, this introduction demonstrates how aunties become abundant figures to think kinship, desire, aesthetics, and politics. Examining academic and arts…
Performance, with Kareem Khubchandani
From Shakespeare to RuPaul, we all love a performance.But what exactly is it?What are its boundaries, its powers, its potential, its stakes?Kareem Khubchandani, who also performs as LaWhore Vagistan -"everyone's favourite desi drag queen aunty" -joins Uncommon Sense to unpack the latest thinking on refusal, repetition and more.And to discuss "Ishtyle", Kareem's ethnography of gay Indian nightlife in Chicago and Bangalore, which attends to desire …
Decolonize Drag
Introduction: Transnational Figurations of the South Asian Aunty
Thanks also to Mhairi Montgomery, Kama Maclean, the South Asia editorial board, and the Taylor and Francis team—you made a daunting project feel enjoyable. This project emerges from the virtual Critical Aunty Studies symposium at Tufts University, funded by a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant that my colleagues, Dr. Sarah Pinto and Dr. Kendra Field, won, titled 'Defamiliarizing the Family: Genealogy and Kinship as Critical Method'—thank you both to the…
Sculpting Queer Futures for Survival: Jaishri Abichandani's Everyday Deities
Working in photography, sculpture, mixed media portraiture, and protest performance, New York-based artist Jaishri Abichandani archives her feminist, queer, and trans South Asian community. In her early work, she photographed drag artists and genderqueer performers at desi parties in the early 2000s, and in a series of ongoing portraits titled Jasmine Blooms at Night she paints tributary portraits of South Asian cultural and political workers (ar…
The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies
LeAnn Fields and University of Michigan Press
In 1987, LeAnn Fields acquired Lynda Hart‘s Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. By the time Fields retired in 2024, she had built a list of more than 280 books in the field of theatre and performance studies at the University of Michigan Press. Hart’s Making a Spectacle is a foundational and still radical book of critical essays on gender, the body, and spectatorship, topics that continue to chart and reverberate …
Craig Jennex, Liberation on the Dance Floor: Popular Music and the Promise of Plurality
Craig Jennex, Liberation on the Dance Floor: Popular Music and the Promise of Plurality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 80 pp. ISBN 9781009351812 (hbk).In Liberation on the Dance Floor, Jennex draws on archival and oral historical research to make apparent the role of music and dance in the gay liberation movement in North America, particularly between the 1960s and 80s. He demonstrates that the social, aesthetic, and affective work…
Sociology (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Queer (13 works) · Art (12 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · South Asian Cinema and Culture (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Politics (7 works)