Anna Voskuil | News Editor
Featured Image: Dr. Gopinath’s lecture addressed understandings of race, sexuality, and gender. | Shaun Fitl
On September 13, New York University’s Dr. Gayatri Gopinath spoke at York as a guest lecturer as part of the Graduate Program in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies’ Annual Lecture series, run by the Graduate Program of Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, and the Centre for Feminist Research.
Co-sponsored by: the Social Science and Anthropology departments; the sexuality studies program; the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies; and the York Centre for Asian Research, Gopinath’s lecture, “Queer Archives, Regional Archives: The Unruly Visions of Sheba Chhachhi and Akram Zaatari,” drew from her research on framings of sexuality and gender through a Diasporic lens.
Gopinath draws predominantly from her book, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora, which is to be published this November.
Gopinath’s work can be seen as critical in the advancement of gender, feminist, and women’s studies both at York and beyond.
In an introduction to Gopinath’s talk, Associate Professor with the School of Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies, Enakshi Dua, says: “What really is so exciting with Professor Gopinath’s work is the sophisticated interdisciplinary, which for those of us in gender studies, still haven’t quite articulated.
“We can go to Professor Gopinath’s work to see it’s not about adding gender, sexuality, and post-colonialist studies together; it’s an interdisciplinarity that develops an analytic framework that weaves together the tension in each of these disciplines into a new structure.”
In defining the term “diaspora,” Dua adds: “Diaspora is often used to talk about migration or movement, but then that analytic concept for me is very provocative in that it dislocates the location from a transnational analysis.
“I know in my own work that’s very difficult to ask, and I’ve always appreciated the tools that Professor Gopinath has provided us.”
Speaking more on Gopinath’s work towards cultural studies in particular, Dua adds: “Second is the potential of cultural studies; her work always has informed the nuanced analysis that brings together both the discursive operations of cultural text—ones that we’re more familiar with—but what challenges us also is about the same text in their disruptive tension.”
As well, Dua sees how Gopinath’s work in Diasporic analysis can apply to modern understandings of the current political environment.
“I think Professor Gopinath was one of the first to place the study of the alt-right in a transnational Diasporic analysis,” she says.
Dua adds that this is “something relevant for us to think about today, as we see the rise of the alt-right to think about how we place that within that Diasporic lens.”
On the critical tools Gopinath has brought to the overall study of gender, feminism, and sexuality, Dua adds: “These tools are ones that I think have informed many scholars and activists into our own critical analytic projects, where they’ve made—I know for me—what we thought was analytically impossible
