Main description:

This book documents and analyzes the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic through queer and feminist perspectives. A testament of dispossessions as well as a celebration of various forms of resilience, community building and critical responses, it chronicles the social history of queer and trans persons and women in South Asia and the diasporas.

Through a creative and collaborative form of ethnographic writing, the book enters in conversation with the worlds of domestic helps, caregivers, cultural workers, students, sex workers and other precariously employed people. It examines the confining effects of the pandemic on the lived realities of many queer and trans individuals, the caste-oppressed and women across socio-economic backgrounds. The chapters in the volume piece together narratives of prejudice, hardship, self-expression and resistance from interviews, personal accounts, as well as poems and stories from activists, artists and other collaborators. The book pays particular attention to issues of power and asymmetrical relationships amidst COVID-19 and offers critiques to deepen the understanding of the uneven fault lines within which historically oppressed persons reside in South Asia.

Exploring themes of migration, disability and sexual politics, this book is an essential reading for scholars and researchers of gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, South Asian studies, sociology and social anthropology.

Contents:

Notes on the Contributors

Foreword by Jasbir K. Puar

Acknowledgements

I: Introduction

Niharika Banerjea, Paul Boyce and Rohit K Dasgupta

II: Testaments, Memories, Epistemic Terrains

1 Looming

Santa Khurai

2 Transnational Entanglements of Geopolitical, Pandemic and Intimate Citizenship

Dhiren Borisa and Gavin Brown

3 House maids, Urban Spacing and Negotiating the 'Other' During Covid Times

Amrita Ghosh

4 Reimaging the Migrant in the Time of the Pandemic

Darshana S. Mini and Anirban K. Baishya

5 The Forbidden Word _ the life during COVID 19

Moshfec Ara

6 Fragmented Realities of the Pandemic: The Multiple Marginalities of Disabled People in India

Nandini Ghosh

7 Desi Woman and Higher Education in the UK: Affect and Effect of Covid-19

Rittika Dasgupta and Naseeba Umar

8 Queer Patchworks: Liveability, Creative Work and Survival in the time of COVID

Rohit K Dasgupta

9 Untitled: I Am Still Becoming

[Kya title bolon? Main tho abhi bhi badal rahan hoon]

Tripta Chandola

10 Remembering COVID-19

Paul Boyce and Raina Roy

11 Metaphor of contagion: The impact of Covid-19 on the Hijras in Bangladesh

Adnan Hossain

III: Un-belonging, Survival, Resistance

12 Stateless Beings

Danny Coyle

13 The Pandemic and Us - Thoughts on Queer Living and Building Social Connections

Poushali, Madhurima, Koyel, Reshmi, Archee, Kolika, Debika

14 Queer in Transit - (Un)settlement and Precarity in Times of COVID-19

Debjyoti Ghosh

15 From #dalitlivesmatters to #mysatyagraha: Nepali Transnational Youth Activism during the Covid-19 pandemic

Premila van Ommen

16 Pandemic Life of Sexual and Gender Minorities of Sri Lanka

Thiyagaraja Waradas

17 Virus that Does not Discriminate but a System that Does: Gender [X] Pakistan

Hena Ali and Rubban Shakeel

18 A Home-in-Making: Risk, Longing and Responsibility in Lockdown

Niharika Banerjea and Sumita Beethi

19 Of Epidemics and Queer Friendships from Manipur in India.

Kumam Davidson

20 Untitled

Queer Rights Collective, Nepal

Index