Description:

A Zoom talk by Akkai Padmashali in conversation with Gayatri Reddy

Akkai Padmashali is a transgender activist based in Bangalore, India, and the founder of Ondede, an organization working toward gender justice across social movements in India.  A longtime grassroots activist, Akkai was one of the co-petitioners who challenged Section 377, a colonial-era law that criminalized sodomy, in the Supreme Court of India in 2018. The event, in the form of a moderated conversation with Chicago-based scholars of gender and sexuality studies, will follow the upcoming release of her autobiography’s English translation, A Small Step in a Long Journey (2022).

Gayatri Reddy is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of sexuality, gender, health, and the politics of subject and community-formation in India, as well as within the immigrant South Asian queer community in the U.S. Broadly, her work interrogates the contours of cultural belonging through the paradoxical dialectic of “alienation and intimacy.”

This event is being organized by The Subcontinent Project, with the support of the Race, Caste and Colorism Project; Gender and Sexuality Studies; the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures; the South Asia Research Forum; Legal Studies; and The Sexualities Project at NU (SPAN)