Navigating “Alli”ship: Notes on Queer Methods and Research Fatigue from Kerala, India
Queer and Trans Studies Working Group
April 4, 2024
3:30 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Suite 153, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileSome months into fieldwork, friends and mentors in LGBTQ+ networks in Kerala, south India, took to calling Shilpa “alli,” a humorous twist on “ally.” In a movement space rife with research fatigue and the ongoing violence of institutional enumeration and extractivism, conducting fieldwork under the disciplinary sign and infrastructure of “anthropology” presents ethical concerns not just for the work of research, but for the very project of building queer communality, intimacy, and expansive political visions. In such a context, Shilpa delves into the work of imbuing alli with disidentificatory possibilities and affect—humour and playfulness that refused the resolution of discomfort and unknowability. She explores how queer and trans theorizations of opacity, relationality, and “subjectless critique” demand not just newer techniques of ethnographic writing and representation, but different ways of being and doing in the field.
Shilpa Parthan (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her ethnographic dissertation looks at how trans and queer people engage with, and theorize, developmentalist state power in Kerala, south India. Her work has been published in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (2021) and as part of the edited volume, Mimetic Desires: Impersonation and Guising across South Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 2023).
Date posted
Jan 24, 2024
Date updated
Mar 11, 2024