I am an anthropologist of South Asia whose work examines questions of sexuality, gender and gender identity through the lenses of political economy, caste capitalism, and the law in India. I am particularly interested in ethnographic theory, migration, social movements, and the history of the left and autonomous feminism I am an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass), where I am affiliated with the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Afro-American Studies, the Social Thought and Political Economy Program (STPEC), and the Asian American Studies Program. I also serve as a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology, Archaeology and Development at the University of Pretoria. I was affiliated with the Global Research Programme on Inequality (GRIP) at the University of Bergen, and remain an Affiliated Researcher in the Centre for Gender Studies (SKOK) there.
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. It examined street-based solicitation done by cisgender Dalit and tribal women who navigated livelihoods through both day wage construction work and sex work. Extending theories of migration and the production of space, the book argues for an understanding sex work as an aspect of labor migration within informal economies, where this migration is mediated by the politics and production of state violence, casteism, livelihood insecurity, and struggles to access to potable water due to caste apartheid.
My second monograph, Dissent in Queer Times (expected 2028), is drawn from long term ethnography of queer, transgender and autonomous feminist movements in India. The book shows that the kind of materialist politics that has characterized queer and transgender activism in India historically is embedded within a genealogy of anti-colonial and postcolonial politics that far exceed contemporary queer and transgender politics. The book covers 2013-2025, curating interviews, notes on travel, and the material culture of movements (fact finding reports, films, petitions, performances) in English, Hindi and Marathi. At the same time, it reflects on the political and aesthetic legacies of Indian social and political upheavals of the long 1970s, and resistance to the rapidly expanding state of exception. Throughout the book, I denote the geographic dispersal and highly networked array of left, feminist, civil liberties and democratic rights movements engaged with queer, transgender and feminist struggle and critique throughout the country.
Along with these monographs, I am engaged in collaborative writing and research projects with colleagues in the US, UK, India and South Africa. These include forthcoming special issues on LGBTQI+ economics for the journal Feminist Economics, ‘Queer and Trans Studies from the Global South for GLQ, and a co-edited Handbook on the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality published by Routledge Press (expected 2027).
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.