Vanita Reddy, “Beauty’s Attachments: Neoliberalism, Affect, and South Asian Diasporic Culture”

Examining novels, short stories, young adult literature, video, visual art, digital media, and live performance, Fashioning Diaspora: Beauty, Femininity, and South Asian American Culture (Temple University Press, 2016) highlights how diasporic subjects’ encounters with and material uses of Indian beauty and fashion produce embodiments and social connections that put pressure on neoliberal practices of national and transnational belonging. It shows how these encounters generate incomplete national and global attachments, affiliations that cross generational, class, and citizenship divides, and modes of embodiment that challenge the otherwise heteronormative and capitalist logic of beauty and fashion. Fashioning Diaspora thus helps us to think differently about beauty and fashion, not simply as dematerialized, overly commodified cultural practices that work seamlessly in the interests of globalizing capital but as articulating South Asian American racial formations and cultural identities through embodied practices of citizenship and belonging.

 

Dr. Vanita Reddy is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, with faculty affiliations in Women's and Gender Studies and the Race and Ethnic Studies Institute. Her articles have appeared in the journals South Asian Popular Culture, Contemporary Literature, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is also co-editing an issue of Scholar and Feminist Online called "Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations," which is forthcoming in Fall 2017.

 

Co-sponsored by the Sexuality Studies Program and Asian American Studies Program.

 

Free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase after the talk.