About Us
We straddle the space of research, usually inhabited by think tanks and policy institutes, and the space of activism, occupied by NGOs and grassroots organisations. This gives us something rare: the ability to think rigorously and act practically, bringing together scholarship, advocacy, and creative expression in a single, sustained project.
2015
Established
One of Ashoka University’s Centres of Excellence.
Our Vision
Our Mission
The mandate of the Centre is to take seriously the multiplicity of norms, identities, issues, practices, and movements within the broad spheres of gender and sexuality.
Where have we come from? How did we get here? And where do we go next? These are the questions that animate our activities — from the speaker series ISHQ and the online research project Mapping Sexuality to the innovative trans* fellowship TAARIF, the only initiative of its kind in South Asia.
Meet the Team
Madhavi Menon
Madhavi Menon is Professor of English at Ashoka University, and Director of the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Her research and writing is on queer theory, and more specifically on issues of desire and identity. She is committed to a non-identitarian politics that takes seriously the desires and fantasies that undergird our everyday lives.
She is the author of two books on Shakespeare, the English Renaissance, and sexuality, the editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare,
and the author of a monograph on queer theory and universalism titled Indifference to Difference: Towards a Queer Universalism. Her latest book is titled Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India (Speaking Tiger, 2018); it brings together ideas important to queer theory with centuries of thought, philosophy, literature, art, and politics in India.
Arunima Theraja
Arunima has a major in English Literature from Miranda House, Delhi University. She also has a double masters in both English Literature (from Ambedkar University, Delhi) and Women’s Studies (from University of York, United Kingdom). Arunima has recently completed her PhD titled, “Kaleidoscopic (Re)Belongings: Queer desire in personal narratives by Indian Womxn” at the Centre for Women’s Studies at the University of York, United Kingdom; funded by the Overseas Research Scholarship, and is a Post-Doc Research Fellow at CSGS. Her research is focused on queer desire and its representations and expressions in autobiographical texts and media narratives by Indian womxn. Arunima is interested in exploring desire in feminist Indian literature as well as in the intersections of LGBTQ+ literary research with queer print media archives and queer digital narratives. Arunima is a passionate educator and researcher. She has previously taught at University of York, Inlingua New Delhi and been a research consultant at NGO’s such as Ektara and Pravaah.
Jagriti Jain
Jagriti Jain works as the Deputy Manager at CSGS. They hold a MSc degree in Gender Studies (Applied) from University of Stirling, Scotland. They also majored in English Literature at Christ University, Bangalore. Their research interests include labour and human rights, postcolonial feminisms, and queer phenomenology. They are enthusiastic about contributing to the growth and development of gender and sexuality studies as a field of research and praxis.
Ekta Rathore
Assistant Manager – Workshops
Ekta Rathore is the Assistant Manager at CSGS and leads the workshops vertical at the centre. She is a writer and researcher working at the intersections of gender, law, and culture. She holds a BA-LLB from the National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi, an LLM in Human Rights Law from the University of Nottingham and an MA in Liberal Studies from the Ashoka University. With a background in human rights law, and literary and gender studies, her work explores how legal frameworks shape social norms and everyday lives.
Past Associates
Charul Mehndiratta
Samreen Mushtaq
Shreyashi Sharma
Neel Sengupta
Malavika Goyal
Alankrita Anand
Ishan Mahendru
Nandita Dutta
