This proposal is a collaboration between the MLA Forum on South Asian and South Asian Diasporic and the South Asian Literary Association, an Allied organization. The panel convener and chair, Nalini Iyer, is a member of the Executive Committee for both entities. This panel features the work of younger scholars who are exploring exciting and new avenues in queer South Asian literature and culture in their graduate research projects. The presentations in this panel feature a range of texts—graphic narratives, novels, documentary film, art, and non-fiction—all of which interrogate what queerness signals in the context of South Asia, particularly at the intersection of queerness and caste, and queerness in rural locations. The presenters explore different texts to outline new approaches to reading/interpreting queerness and to examine resistance to normative sexualities in the context of nation, diaspora, religious ideology, and gender performativity. This panel also echoes the MLA 2026 Presidential theme of Family Resemblances by engaging in questions of both literal kinship and family and also relational thinking across genres in the South Asian queer space.

Literary scholars such as Gayatri Gopinath in her pioneering work Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005) and Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai in Same Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000) and Queering India: Same Sex Love and Eroticism in India (2002) began sustained scholarly work on queer approaches to South Asian literature and examined colonial contexts, diasporic histories, and queer representation across South Asian history. Numerous scholars have published articles on queer South Asian literature and film and more recent books include O.Kasmani (Pakistan Desires: Queer Futures Elsewhere, 2023) and Kareem Khubchandani (Ishtyle:Accenting Gay Indian Lifestyle, 2020). At the same time, queer South Asian writers (Shyam Selvadurai, S.J.Sindhu, Nawaaz Ahmad, Shani Mootoo to name a few) and queer films, both mainstream Bollywood (Badhaai Ho) and independent (Kattumaram, Joyland) have proliferated. Yet, within South Asian literary and cultural studies scholarship, queer approaches to reading literary works and cultural texts remain marginal. Additionally, despite legal changes in some parts of South Asia, being queer and expressing one’s queerness remains unsafe. Furthermore, under the Trump administration queer studies are under attack and three of the four panelists here are graduate students based in the US where their work is likely to become vulnerable. It is therefore urgent and important that this panel be supported by the MLA.

The presenters are four graduate students—three from the US and one from the UK. Aakanksha Singh, Ph.D. candidate at the University of York in her paper “: Perceiving Quiet Queerness as Counter Heteronormative and a Means of Resistance in Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing “conceptualizes “quiet queerness” as the opposite of queer visibility in India and studies Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Kari and Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman. Vasantha Sambamurti, a Ph.D. student at Tufts, will present “Transnational Intimacies of Queer(ed) Confession in Summer in Veins (1999) “ exploring how Saran’s documentary illuminates new veins of transnational intimacy through a cinematic queering of the confession genre. Urnisa Karmakar, Ph.D. student at Texas A&M, will present“ Decolonizing Divinity: Dalit Queer Futurism in Osheen Siva’s Space Heads” on a Tamil Dalit queer artist’s work that challenges Brahminical ideals of purity, caste, and heteronormativity, reconfiguring sacred spaces into radical frameworks of Dalit queer futurism. The fourth presenter Swati Baruah’s paper “What happens when Women Love Women: Struggles of Class, Queerness and Gender in the South Asian Postcolony” examines lesbian identities in rural India in Maya Sharma’s Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India (2006).

These papers represent different approaches to understanding queer South Asia at the intersection of nation, class, caste, and religion. These speakers are all beginning their scholarly careers and their presentations represent new directions in South Asian queer studies