6:30 p.m.
The interlocking technologies of caste, gender, sexuality, and humanity continue to shape identity, agency, and citizenship in South Asia and beyond. This talk focuses on Dalits’ radical critique of the caste system and their engagement with the transformative potential of the interlocking politics of gender, sexuality, and the human. It demonstrates how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and the violence of caste in our everyday lives.
Biography:
Dr. Shailaja Paik is Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Associate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Sociology, and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is a 2024 MacArthur Foundation “genius” Fellow. Paik is also the Founding Executive Director of the Institute for Just Futures. Her work analyzes the politics of caste, gender, class, and sexuality, by focusing on the ideas, actions, and lives of Dalits (“Untouchables”). Her first book Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit (“Untouchable”) women in urban India. Her second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity (Stanford University Press, 2022) focuses on the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. Her book won two prestigious awards: the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards prize and the Association of Asian Studies Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy prize. She is currently working on new book projects: Caste Domination and Normative Sexuality in Modern India, the Cambridge Companion to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, and Caste, Race, and Indigeneity in South Asia and Beyond. Her research is funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, Yale University, Emory University, the Ford Foundation, and the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center, among others. Paik has published several articles on a variety of themes, including kissing and nationalism, the politics of naming, Dalit and African American women’s solidarity, Dalit women’s education, and new Dalit womanhood in colonial India. Her scholarship and research interests are concerned with contributing to and furthering the dialogue in anti-race, anti-caste, and anti-patriarchy, human rights, anti-colonial struggles, transnational women’s history, and women-of-color feminisms.
Department Sponsors: The Graduate School, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, Department of Anthropology, Gender Women and Sexuality Studies, School of Law, Department of History