Session Modality: Hybrid 

(IMPORTANT: You must create an account on the NeMLA Portal to submit. Or else the Portal might show as "abstract submission closed" for you.) This panel explores complex intersections of drag culture and queer performativity, and their imperial legacies in South Asia. Judith Butler, in her ‘Gender Trouble’, showed us how performative gender is. Drawing from Butler among other scholars, this panel seeks to consider how drag in all its performativity, far from being a modern or Western invention, has deep historical roots across cultures, ranging from Roman pantomime to Elizabethan cross-dressing laws to Victorian ‘Molly’ houses. Likewise, in South Asia, drag traditions have long negotiated gendered norms through subversion and survival, drawing on ancient non-binary identities, as seen in the Kamasutra , to Mughal-era Hijra performers and Sufi poetry. A closer look reveals how transnational exchanges of colonialism, global capitalism, and cultural exchange have been shaping the aesthetics and politics of drag and leading to a crude ‘exoticism’, ‘spectacularization’, or commodification of the same; something that this panel seeks to examine. We are particularly interested in works, such as Arundhati Roy’s novels (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, The God of Small Things etc.), or Rituparno Ghosh’s films (Chitrangada), or Dalit queer collectives and grassroots activism (The Pink List India, Aravani Art Project, Dalit Queer Project etc.).which highlight drag’s role in resisting casteist and imperial hierarchies and seek contributions that interrogate drag as a site of cultural negotiation, complicit with power yet potentially subversive. 

Suggested themes may include, but are not limited to: 

· drag as colonial archive,

· global drag economies,

· race and imperial drag, 

· state-sanctioned versus underground drag, 

· folk performance as resistance 

· Indigenous gender traditions that disrupt Eurocentric paradigms

Gender scholars like Kareem Khubchandani or Mikko Laamanen, inform discussions on drag’s relationship to cosmopolitanism, diaspora, and “rainbow capitalism.”, in a similar way, this panel encourages interdisciplinary engagement with drag’s entwinement with empire, capitalism, and cultural memory in South Asia, and especially values scholarship centering erased or marginalized queer performance histories and aesthetics beyond the Western binary.