Trans/itory Belongings: At the Borders of Skin and Citizenship

This essay discusses the case of Shivi, a transgender South Asian American who won a legal case in New Delhi against their parents, who tried to force Shivi to stay in India and live as a cisgender person. These acts of transphobic domestic violence were challenged by queer activists and judiciaries in India. With Shivi’s case serving as a starting point, this essay considers how South Asian diasporas imagine India to be sexually conservative in disturbing ways that do a disservice to the vitality of queer and feminist movements in the Global South. By looking at Hijras and other gender dissident communities within this context, this essay also suggests that a globalized grammar of LGBTQI rights ignores genealogies of gendered transgression and queer activism in non-Western contexts. I discuss national borders and the boundaries/borders of bodies as spaces of gendered translation, transgression and untranslatable violence

Where's Omar? Where Is Justice?

Omar Khadr was arrested at the age of 15 by the U.S military and has remained in custody in Guantanamo for 8 years. Today, he plead guilty to five war crime charges. Despite stating in open court last summer that he would not plead guilty, today he muttered a confession. In accordance with the plea bargain, Khadr plead guilty to murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, and spying. Following this, a jury imposed the harshest possible sentence, 40 years imprisonment. Khadr may receive parole after eight years. The first year of this sentence will be served in Gauntanamo, following which he may be repatriated. The government of Canada does not have to repatriate Khadr, nor is parole guaranteed. Rather than hypothesizing outcomes, I want to discuss the case philosophically

Putting the ‘Cool’in Coolie: Disidentification, desire and dissent in the work of filmmaker Michelle Mohabeer

“It’s referencing back all of those Indian women that have come worked on the plantations and in the cane fields. It’s empowering them to a degree and yet the dance is South Asian…it evokes Bengali folk dance. It has an Indianness coded in it….And on the side of that shot is the Guyana flag which I’ve inverted as well which is a big thing because in not showing the flag as is, I’m gesturing to the question of sexuality. So there are many layers there…” (Mohabeer 2008) Toronto-based filmmaker Michelle Mohabeer’s films offer a rare glimpse into the multiple layers of irony and resistance that define dissident Caribbean sexualities. Mohabeer offers what she terms an “oppositional aesthetics” (Ibid) to capture the disparate layers of politics, memory, and desire which shape dissident sexualities in postcolonial Guyana and the Caribbean diaspora. In this paper, I am interested in how the complex entanglements through which Caribbean sexualities are processed are expressed through avant garde art forms