Organized by the Department of Asian American Studies and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center

Date: Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Time: 6:00 – 7:15 PM
Location: Online/Zoom (RSVP)

Professor Navaneetha Mokkil will discuss her new book, Unruly Figures, which navigates the pulsating links between subjectivity, political activism and the world-making capacity of cultural practices in a non-metropolitan region in India. It focuses on the non-linear figurations of the sex worker and the lesbian in Kerala, a state in Southern India, and the fractured processes of staging the politics of sexuality. The book moves back and forth from the post-1990s to the pre-1990s interlinking different forms, texts, genres and events in order to show how sexual subjects are not finished portraits, nor silenced bodies eager to claim visibility and recognition. Rather, the transactions between the subject and the figure point to the breaks in the conception of a cohesive, visible and agential political actor.

Navaneetha Mokkil teaches at the Center for Women’s Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She is currently Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.