Churnjeet Mahn – författare

This collection contributes to an understanding of queer theory as a "queer share," addressing the urgent need to redistribute resources in a university world characterized by stark material disparities and embedded gendered, racial, national, and class inequities. From across a range of precarious and relatively secure positions, authors consider the changing politics of queer theory and the shifting practices of queers who, in moving from the margins toward the academic mainstream, differently negotiate resources, recognition, and returns. Contributors engage queer redistributions in all tiers of the class-stratified academy and across the UK, the US, Australia, Armenia, Canada, and Spain. They both indict academic hierarchy as a form of colonial knowledge-making and explore class contradictions via first-generation epistemologies, feminist care work in the pandemic, Black working-class visibility, non-peer institutional collaborations, and student labor. The volume reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical approaches and methodologies across anthropology, Black studies, cultural studies, education, feminist and women’s studies, geography, Latinx studies, performance studies, postcolonial studies, public health, transgender studies, sociology, student affairs, and queer studies. This book is for readers seeking to better understand the broad class-based knowledge project that has become a defining feature of the field of queer studies.

This collection contributes to an understanding of queer theory as a "queer share," addressing the urgent need to redistribute resources in a university world characterized by stark material disparities and embedded gendered, racial, national, and class inequities. From across a range of precarious and relatively secure positions, authors consider the changing politics of queer theory and the shifting practices of queers who, in moving from the margins toward the academic mainstream, differently negotiate resources, recognition, and returns. Contributors engage queer redistributions in all tiers of the class-stratified academy and across the UK, the US, Australia, Armenia, Canada, and Spain. They both indict academic hierarchy as a form of colonial knowledge-making and explore class contradictions via first-generation epistemologies, feminist care work in the pandemic, Black working-class visibility, non-peer institutional collaborations, and student labor. The volume reflects a commitment to interdisciplinary empirical and theoretical approaches and methodologies across anthropology, Black studies, cultural studies, education, feminist and women’s studies, geography, Latinx studies, performance studies, postcolonial studies, public health, transgender studies, sociology, student affairs, and queer studies. This book is for readers seeking to better understand the broad class-based knowledge project that has become a defining feature of the field of queer studies.

Queerness remains a central fault line in contemporary South Asia. Colonial-era ‘anti-sodomy’ laws, codified in Article 377 of the penal codes in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, or Article 365 in Sri Lanka, exemplify the shared imperial lineages of the region as also their long postcolonial afterlives. Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. New media technologies have increasingly connected diasporic space with mainland South Asia, globalising queer networks. Yet, these trajectories are necessarily discontinuous.In the last two decades whilst there has been an explosion of LGBTQ+ visibility most notably in South Asian film, television and new media, this visibility has come with mainstream ideological agendas which do not especially represent the diversity of queer lives in South Asia along key identities of caste, class, religion and region. This book seeks to encourage critical thinking by suggesting ways in which notions of culture, neoliberalism, nationalism and queerness in the context of new authoritarianisms are disentangled. The chapters in this volume take up these questions and offer critical imaginings of sexual politics and its imbrication with popular culture and authoritarian politics within contemporary South Asia.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Queerness remains a central fault line in contemporary South Asia. Colonial-era ‘anti-sodomy’ laws, codified in Article 377 of the penal codes in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, or Article 365 in Sri Lanka, exemplify the shared imperial lineages of the region as also their long postcolonial afterlives. Across South Asia and the world, new authoritarianisms have reignited old fault lines around sexuality. New media technologies have increasingly connected diasporic space with mainland South Asia, globalising queer networks. Yet, these trajectories are necessarily discontinuous.In the last two decades whilst there has been an explosion of LGBTQ+ visibility most notably in South Asian film, television and new media, this visibility has come with mainstream ideological agendas which do not especially represent the diversity of queer lives in South Asia along key identities of caste, class, religion and region. This book seeks to encourage critical thinking by suggesting ways in which notions of culture, neoliberalism, nationalism and queerness in the context of new authoritarianisms are disentangled. The chapters in this volume take up these questions and offer critical imaginings of sexual politics and its imbrication with popular culture and authoritarian politics within contemporary South Asia.The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Beginning with the publication of the first Murray guidebook to Greece in 1840 and ending with Virginia Woolf's journey to Athens, this book offers a genealogy of British women's travel literature about Greece. Churnjeet Mahn recounts the women's first-hand experiences of the sites and sights of antiquity, analyzing travel accounts by archaeologists, ethnographers, journalists, and tourists to chart women's renderings of Modern Greece through a series of discursive lenses. Mahn's offers insights into the importance of the Murray and Baedeker guidebooks; how knowledge of Greece and Classical Studies were used to justify colonial rule of India at the same time that Agnes Smith Lewis and Jane Ellen Harrison used Greece as a symbol of women's emancipation; British women's production of the first anthropological accounts of Modern Greece; and fin-de-siècle women who asserted their right to see and claim antiquity at the same time that the safety of the independent lady traveler was being called into question by the media.

Queer Precarity in Higher Education looks at queer scholars pushing against institutional structures, and the queer knowledge that gets pushed out by universities. It provides insight into the work of, in and beyond academia as it is un-done in the contemporary (post)Covid moment, not least by queer academic-activists.This radical un-doing represents cycles of queer precarity, pragmatism and participation both situating and questioning the ‘queer arrival’ of institutionalized programmes and presences (e.g. queer and gender studies degrees, prominent and public feminist academics). In this book, the contributors push back against contemporary educational precarity, mobilizing queer insight and insistence; and push back against confinement of the University, socially and spatially. The collection brings together academic-activist perspectives to extend understandings of experiences of marginalization and inequality in higher education. It also documents the diversity of tactics with which queers negotiate and resist the various, shifting and interconnected forms of precarity and privilege found on the edges of academia.Contributors consider these issues from inside/outside academia and across career course, challenging the ‘queer arrival’ as emanating outward from the university to the community, from the academic to the activist, or from a state of privilege to a place of precarity.

Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education looks at queer scholars pushing against institutional structures, and the queer knowledge that gets pushed out by universities. It provides insight into the work of, in and beyond academia as it is un-done in the contemporary (post)Covid moment, not least by queer academic-activists.This radical un-doing represents cycles of queer precarity, pragmatism and participation both situating and questioning the ‘queer arrival’ of institutionalized programmes and presences (e.g. queer and gender studies degrees, prominent and public feminist academics). In this book, the contributors push back against contemporary educational precarity, mobilizing queer insight and insistence; and push back against confinement of the University, socially and spatially. The collection brings together academic-activist perspectives to extend understandings of experiences of marginalization and inequality in higher education. It also documents the diversity of tactics with which queers negotiate and resist the various, shifting and interconnected forms of precarity and privilege found on the edges of academia.Contributors consider these issues from inside/outside academia and across career course, challenging the ‘queer arrival’ as emanating outward from the university to the community, from the academic to the activist, or from a state of privilege to a place of precarity.

Beginning with the publication of the first Murray guidebook to Greece in 1840 and ending with Virginia Woolf's journey to Athens, this book offers a genealogy of British women's travel literature about Greece. Churnjeet Mahn recounts the women's first-hand experiences of the sites and sights of antiquity, analyzing travel accounts by archaeologists, ethnographers, journalists, and tourists to chart women's renderings of Modern Greece through a series of discursive lenses. Mahn's offers insights into the importance of the Murray and Baedeker guidebooks; how knowledge of Greece and Classical Studies were used to justify colonial rule of India at the same time that Agnes Smith Lewis and Jane Ellen Harrison used Greece as a symbol of women's emancipation; British women's production of the first anthropological accounts of Modern Greece; and fin-de-siècle women who asserted their right to see and claim antiquity at the same time that the safety of the independent lady traveler was being called into question by the media.

What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, ‘do’? Creativity and resistance in a hostile world draws on original collaborative research that brings together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and resistance in a hostile world. In times of racial nationalism across the world, this volume seeks to understand how creative acts have agitated for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of hope.Drawing on a series of case studies, this volume focuses on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to racisms, the legacies of colonialism or the depredations of capitalist employment across several contexts and locations, including England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention, foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries. The authors also critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative research within and beyond the academy.

What can culture, and its manifestations in artistic and creative forms, ‘do’? Creativity and resistance in a hostile world draws on original collaborative research that brings together a range of stories and perspectives on the role of creativity and resistance in a hostile world. In times of racial nationalism across the world, this volume seeks to understand how creative acts have agitated for social change. The book suggests that creative actions themselves, and acting together creatively, can at the same time offer vital sources of hope.Drawing on a series of case studies, this volume focuses on the past and emergent grassroots arts work that has responded to racisms, the legacies of colonialism or the depredations of capitalist employment across several contexts and locations, including England, Northern Ireland and India. The book makes a timely intervention, foregrounding the value of creativity for those who are commonly marginalised from centres of power, including from the mainstream cultural industries. The authors also critically reflect on the possibilities and limitations of collaborative research within and beyond the academy.

Desi Queers reveals how diasporic South Asians have shaped LGBTQ+ movements and communities in Britain, from the 1970s to the present day. Weaving the history of 1980s anti-racism with the emergence of Black LGBTQ+ and feminist coalitions, this book highlights landmark moments in British queer life and culture through South Asian lives, and illuminates British histories of colour through queer politics and creativity.From the Gay Black Group to Haringey Council's pioneering Lesbian and Gay Unit, desi queers were at the centre of anti-homophobic direct action in the 1980s, including the historic 'Smash the Backlash' demo against bigotry. This activism birthed key grassroots groups of the 1980s and 1990s, such as Shakti and Naz, whose founders and early members opened a path of creative resistance to the intersecting violence of racism and homophobia--a path of solidarity echoing through the twenty-first century.These spaces and networks have been a refuge for people doubly marginalised in Britain--by experiences of homophobia within South Asian communities, and by the whiteness of mainstream queer scenes. Drawing on artistic creations, archives and oral history, Desi Queers celebrates rich traditions of social and cultural activism alongside stories of everyday life among Britain's LGBTQ+ South Asians.

This edited collection attends to the locations of memory along and about the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh borders and the complex ways in which such memories are both allowed for and erased in the present.