About

DSC00478I am an Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, affiliated with South Asian Studies.

I specialize in the sociology of gender & sexuality, globalization, and social movements.  My work draws inspiration from transnational feminist, postcolonial, and queer theory.  Most of my work has focused on India, but my research has also taken me to Kenya, South Africa, and Bangladesh, and I bring a global perspective to all of my writing and teaching.

I write at the intersection of local politics, the state, and global institutions. My first book, At Risk: Indian Sexual Politics and the Global AIDS Crisis (Stanford, 2021), uses over 150 in-depth interviews and ethnographic research across India and Kenya to show how activist groups of sex workers, sexual minorities, and transgender people engaged, and often challenged, corporate donors, state agencies, and biomedical experts; became central to India’s AIDS response; and transformed themselves in the process. Moving across the spaces of everyday life, grassroots HIV prevention, NGOs, and state agencies, the book argues that the AIDS response generated a new terrain for articulating Indian sexual identity, both within and beyond India’s borders. It ultimately reveals how gender, sexuality, and nation shape crisis response, and traces the realignments crisis occasions for political and sexual life. In 2022, At Risk won four book awards at the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP).

In addition to At Risk, I am the co-editor, with Smitha Radhakrishnan, of the volume Sociology of South Asia: Postcolonial Legacies, Global Imaginaries (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).  I worked with the transgender human rights activist Akkai Padmashali to write her English-language autobiography, A Small Step in  a Long Journey (Zubaan, 2022). Here are some articles about Akkai’s book. I work collaboratively on projects with Subadra Panchanadeswaran and Shubha Chacko, most recently on sex work and aging (including an illustrated book, At the Threshold, based on life history interviews with sex workers.)

I am currently at work on two new projects. One focuses on the political economy of sexuality in contemporary Bangalore. Through the trajectories of cisgender and transgender women workers (garment workers, sex workers, and street vendors), the project investigates the ways marriage, sexuality, and sexual exchange are intimately tied to experiences of rural-urban migration. The second focuses on love, romance, and dating in the South Asian diaspora.

My essays and articles appear in the journals Signs, Social Problems, Global Labor Journal, Contemporary South Asia, Qualitative Sociology, World Development, Political Power and Social Theory, Global Public Health, and Gender & Society, and my research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Institute of Indian Studies, as well as the Mandel Center for the Humanities and the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. I am one of the co-curators for the Feminisms Unbound speaker series through the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Society (GCWS), a Boston-area consortium of feminist scholars. I am an elected member of the Council for the Global and Transnational Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, and I serve on the editorial boards of the journals Signs and Gender & Society.