I am an anthropologist of South Asia whose work examines questions of sexuality and gender in relation to class, racialization, caste, and political economy in India. I am particularly interested in ethnographic theory, theories of space, and the history of the left and feminist movements in postcolonial worlds. I am based at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass), where I am an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. I am affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Graduate Certificate in Ethnographic Research, the Department of Afro-American Studies, the Asian American Studies Program, the Five Colleges Reproductive Health, Rights and Justice Certificate, the Center for Justice, Law and Societies, and the World Studies Interdisciplinary Project at UMass. I also serve as a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Development at the University of Pretoria, and am an Affiliated Researcher in the Centre for Gender Studies (SKOK) and the Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP) at the University of Bergen in Norway.
I earned my doctorate in Columbia University’s joint program in Anthropology and Public Health and, previously, a Master’s in Public Health degree from Emory University. I am an undergraduate alum of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Department of Anthropology.
My first monograph, Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai (Duke University Press, 2014) was an ethnography of sex work, migration, and urban informal economies in India. Its object was street-based solicitation done by cisgender Dalit and tribal women who navigated livelihoods through both construction and sex work. Using and extending theoretical work on migration and the production of space, the books argues for an understanding sex work as an aspect of labor migration and informal economies mediated by the politics and production of state violence, caste, space, livelihood insecurity, and access to potable water.
I am working on a second monograph, drawn from long term ethnography of radical social movements in India, including left, queer, transgender and autonomous feminist movements. The book writes from seams of queer and transgender activism and politics that are embedded within both traditional and new left formations. It curates interviews, notes on travel, and the material culture of movement spaces to denote the geographic dispersal of the movement ecologies the book addresses.
I am also engaged in collaborative writing and research projects with colleagues in the US, UK, India and South Africa. These include a series of meetings being organized under the theme of ‘Queer and Trans World Anthropologies.’
I have presented my work and taught internationally. My work has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Fulbright Foundation, Jawaharlal Nehru University, the University of Bergen, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.