Join us for the Department of Gender Studies Welcome Lecture 2025!
This lecture is based on five years of ethnographic and archival research into South Asian migration to the UK. While this field has generated a substantial body of scholarship, the experiences of queer South Asian migrants in the twentieth century remain significantly underexplored. This lecture, based on the British Academy project Cross Border Queers and the recently published book Desi Queers, seeks to address this omission by interrogating both the whitewashing of British queer history and the heteronormative framing of migrant histories.
You're invited to join a drinks reception after the event.
This event is for LSE Gender students, staff, alumni and affiliates as part of our Welcome Week programme. LSE students and staff from other departments, and the public are welcome to join. Please email gender.events@lse.ac.uk in advance of the event to ensure we have a record of your attendance. Information about accessing a recording of the event afterwards will be available on the Department of Gender Studies website.
Meet our speakers and chair
Rohit K Dasgupta is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the Department of Gender Studies. Using ethnographic and creative methodologies he has explored the relationship between sexuality, class and belonging in contemporary India which led to his first monograph Digital Queer Cultures in India: Politics, Intimacies & Belonging (Routledge, 2017) and the subsequent books Queering Digital India: Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Social Media, Sexuality & Sexual Health Advocacy in Kolkata, India (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Friendship as Social Justice Activism (Seagull/University of Chicago Press, 2018), which received an Honourable Mention by Pen America. He currently edits two book series - Ethnographic Innovations, South Asian Perspectives (with Niharika Banerjea & Paul Boyce) for Routledge and South Asian Screens (with Sangita Gopal) for Bloomsbury.
Sumi Madhok is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies and Head of the LSE Department of Gender Studies. Her work combines theoretical, conceptual and philosophical investigations with detailed ethnographies of the lived experiences, political subjectivation, and political struggles for rights and justice, specifically, in South Asia. She is most recently the author of Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press 2021), which won both the Susan Strange Book Prize and Sussex International Theory Prize in 2022. Professor Madhok is also the author of Rethinking Agency: Developmentalism, Gender and Rights (2013); the co-editor of Gender, Agency and Coercion (2013); and of the Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (2014).
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