On Queerly Hidden Lives: Precarity and (In)visibility between Formal and Informal Economies in India

Aniruddha Dutta is assistant professor in the departments of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and Asian and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Iowa. Dutta’s research interests lie in globalization, development, gender, and sexuality, in particular the institutionalization of gender and sexual identity politics in India. Their ongoing book project, tentatively titled Globalizing through the Vernacular: The Making of Gender and Sexual Minorities in Eastern India, explores the role of seemingly peripheral or “local” communities, networks, and subcultures in the globalizing expansion of liberal democratic discourses of gender/sexual identity and rights, studying how this process transforms, reconfigures, or reproduces structural hierarchies of language, class, caste, and citizenship.