Srila Roy
Professor
University of the Witwatersrand
I live and work in Johannesburg, as Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. My long-standing interest and expertise is in the field of transnational gender and sexuality studies. I am the author of Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India's Naxalbari Movement, one of the first books on the gender and sexual politics of Indian Maoism. My second book, Changing the Subject: Feminist and Queer Politics in Neoliberal India, maps a rapidly changing terrain of queer and feminist organizing under conditions of neoliberalism and globalization. Together with essays that I have edited either by myself or with colleagues, my research advances debates on postcolonial gender and sexualities, development, neoliberalism and social movements, and centres the Global South in feminist enquiry.
Latest Monograph
Changing the Subject (2022)
“In this powerful, provocative, brilliant work of qualitative analysis and feminist theory, Srila Roy reveals queer and feminist activism of the last few decades in India as a story of the government of both society and of self, constituted by entanglements of historical and ongoing politics rather than one co-opted by the advent of neoliberal market reforms. Changing the Subject is essential reading for any understanding of how feminism and queer feminisms produce subjects and subjectivities.” — Inderpal Grewal, co-editor of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism
“Through close ethnographic study of two feminist organizations in West Bengal, Srila Roy deftly demonstrates the promises and failures of the alignment between neoliberalism and feminism—in which each project relies on and is irreducible to the other. Offering fresh and counterintuitive arguments about feminist and queer politics in India, co-optation, and neoliberal governmentality in the Global South, Changing the Subject will be an integral part of the story of social justice movements everywhere capitalism and its antagonists meet.” — Naisargi N. Dave, author of Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics
