Unruly Visions examines queer visual aesthetic practices that negotiate diasporic movement in multiple geographic locations, and suggest other possibilities of moving through these spaces that deviate from the straight lines of hetero- and homonormative scripts that typically determine one’s life trajectory. These practices disrupt the normative ways of seeing (and hence knowing) that are the legacy of colonial modernity, and that have been so central to the production, containment and disciplining of sexual, racial, and gendered bodies. Crucially, they do so through a deployment of queer desire and identification that renders apparent the intimacies of our conjoined pasts and potential futures.

Gayatri Gopinath is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at NYU. She works at the intersection of transnational feminist and queer studies, postcolonial studies, and diaspora studies, and is the author of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke UP, 2005). Her new book, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in October 2018. She has published numerous essays on gender, sexuality, and diasporic cultural production in journals such as Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, GLQ, Social Text, positions, and Diaspora.