Feminist & Gender Studies is proud to announce Dr. Rushaan Kumar’s new publication: “Bodies that Matter: Partition Masculinity and the Transgender Archive in Qissa” in Feminist Review 133(1): 34-39.

In this article, Professor Kumar provides a critical trans reading of the Punjabi film Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (2014) “to offer alternative archives of emotion, trauma and memory that complicate the familiar analytical binaries within which Partition and related questions of citizenship and belonging are theorized” (2023: 35). In reading the film “against the grain of its affective structure,” he argues that “one might find a counter-archive of Partition in which the birth of the postcolonial nation and indeed its future is guaranteed not by the infliction of trauma and violence, but by building affective solidarities across gender and caste differences” (2023: 38).

 “Feminist Review’s purpose is to hold space for conversations that rethink and reimagine feminist scholarship and praxis: the modes and contexts in which it operates, the questions it takes up, and with whom feminisms are in conversation. Feminist Review aims to publish accessible knowledge and timely interventions that build on the work of Black, Indigenous, decolonial, and transnational feminist struggle, proceeds with and advances an intersectional feminist understanding that inequalities within social categories and organising mechanisms of gender, race, class, sexuality, ableism, ethnicity, coloniality, capitalism, and sanism, among others, are co-constitutive. Feminist Review is committed to inspiring exchanges of ideas and explorations of praxis that address, disrupt, and break through structural violence to make and nurture communities, connections, and ways of sharing knowledge founded on mutual respect, kindness, and care.”

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Kumar on this publication! We are so proud to know you!