A Writing Circle
Felt Notes
ID: An excerpt from a zine called “Abundance” that Tash made in conversation with their term paper for the Winter 2025 doctoral seminar on “Feminist and Queer Worldmaking.” The above collage combines Shailaja Paik’s glossary from The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (2022) and black illustrations of a pressed flower. Image courtesy of Tash (May 2025).
When my colleague and doctoral program head, Kiranmayi Indraganti, invited me to give a talk at this year’s PhD orientation program, I was drawn to doing something collectively and distinct from past iterations, which is, to bring back into being a set of engagements with the seminar on “Feminist and Queer Worldmaking” [1] that I taught last semester. Whilst this form of doingness differed from my previous solo presentations on “Otherwise Research Experiences: A Queer Survival Praxis” (talk, 2023) and “Building Voice: A Critical Citational Practice” (workshop, 2024), it also extended them into a nested frame for dialoging about all things feminist, Queer, and scholarly in community. The resulting engagement, involving a set of three lightning talks each by Tash, Kiranmayi, and me allowed us to re-enact the experiences of what the seminar truly functioned as: a semester-long reading and writing circle.
In “Cite Pedagogy,” for example, I reflected on aspects of seminar facilitation that were most meaningful for my own scholarly-creative work; outlined key moments of connection with Tash’s and Kiranmayi’s individual participation; and illustrated what I mean when I say cite pedagogy. I was intentional in structuring the course around scholarship in feminist, Queer, and Trans studies that “emerges from elsewhere;” [1] an elsewhere that is both transnational and translocal in concept, materiality, and experience. Building upon Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir Puar’s theorization of “elsewhere” as portioned off from US-centered and US-centric Queer theory to recognize geo-political urgencies within and beyond “area studies,” I asked: What forms of Queer- and Trans-feminist theorization do these elsewheres orient us toward? And which geographies and anti-colonial critiques are rendered palpable through each of their works, and elsewheres, in the present? By inquiring into debates within and across weekly materials and sub-themes, I was able to further my interpretive work and writing in and as critical worldmaking.
In “Bite into these zines,” Tash utilized the form and practice of self-made zines to depict how the seminar texts informed their investigations into print matter histories of Queer-Trans organizings in India, and how the course as a whole supported their access to the often underrepresented and occluded Queer- and Trans-feminist worlds. Brilliantly for me, it was Tash’s notes on the significance of such a space among what they described as an “already shrinking academic landscape engaging with Queer-Trans feminist scholarship and Queer and women’s movements in the country” that was a helpful reminder of why this pedagogy matters. Tash concluded by sharing excerpts of their final paper on “The Uses of Imagination” or “how imagination is used as a methodology for studying archival history within Shailaja Paik’s and Anjali Arondekar’s individual works” [2] and why this articulation is relevant for their research.
In “Learnings,” Kiranmayi noted the generative potentials of an independent doctoral study unit and explained how this course, for instance, facilitated her own writing, editing, and reflections on documentary filmmaking practice both retrospectively and projectively. In particular, by working on the connections between “histories, gender, and sexuality” in Anjali Arondekar’s and Shailaja Paik’s full-length texts and thinking with two of her own previously made short films each on “Nyay Committee” (Legal Counselling Committee) and “ALC” (Adult Literacy Centre) [3], she asked: “What purpose does the placing of a camera in a community-centered filmmaking context serve? And how might revisiting these films as their own archival forms help raise new questions about feminist documentary practice?” For Kiranmayi, the seminar served as a site “to enrich,” in her words, “an understanding of scholarly positions and new emerging literature on history-writing, historiography, archive-making, and positionalities in relation to Queer and feminist worldmaking.”
Grateful.
Notes
[1] Interrelating feminist, Queer, and Trans studies, the 2025 seminar (which was the second time I taught this unit), covered the following sub-themes: Sexuality, Coloniality, Historiography; Colonial and Postcolonial Records; Organizing Histories; Archival Difference; Queer Studies Now; Trans Studies Where; Queer and Trans Studies as Area Studies; and Queer and Trans Futurities.
[2] Maya Mikdashi and Jasbir Puar, “Queer Theory and Permanent War,” GLQ 22 (2) (2016), 2015-22.
[3] Shailaja Paik, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Navayana Publishing, 2022) and Anjali Arondekar, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Orient BlackSwan, 2023).
[4] “These films,” Kiranmayi added “were made between 2013 and 2014 in the context of a six-film compilation for the Andhra Pradesh Mahila Sadhikara Samithi (APMSS), a quasi-Government women’s organization in Hyderabad, which was part of a larger Government of India project aimed at women’s education and empowerment. They were shot in region’s Karimnagar, Vizianagaram, and Anantapur districts prior to state bifurcation in 2014.”
About
Felt Notes are monthly dispatches about the work of the Just Futures Co-lab, and the co-labouring worlds of research and teaching in art, design, and the digital humanities that it scaffolds, furthers, and amplifies. The letter writing translates the ever so negotiated nature of this space at Srishti Manipal Institute and the discourse and scholarship on equity and justice I produce with students and wider academic and non-academic community members through critical pedagogy; archival and database constructions; interactive digital storytelling; and inquiries into queer- and trans-feminist digital technologies and knowledge infrastructures.
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Kush Patel