+ Key Projects

My book with Kalpana Kannabiran (Zubaan Books 2021), traces the gendered politics of India’s privacy jurisprudence, especially in the context of the recent Supreme Court judgment of Puttaswamy v. Union of India and Others. Using a critical historical analysis, we unpack the impact, usefulness, and potential threat to using a constitutional privacy framework for enabling individual freedoms (e.g., with regards to the gendered body and sexual personhood) and collective institutional regimes (e.g., the hetero-patriarchal family).

A forthcoming second project analyzes the temporality of global social movements for legitimizing the rights of sexual minorities. Using a comparative framework, this project problematizes the assumption that “progressive countries” have better LGBTQI laws from the perspective of countries like Pakistan and India where trans and third-gender friendly laws are adopted and championed despite differently regressive LGB legal regimes. In doing so, it sheds light on the culture of legal rights in these comparative political economies and the ways in which historic rights consciousness around the individual and collective social contracts may influence legislative and legal change.

A third emerging field of scholarship pays attention to the relationship between transnational migration and family law. Following recent fieldwork on the families of Gulf migrant workers in Kerala, India, this project aims to reveal the complicated implications these labor processes have for transnational families, especially against the increasingly complicated backdrop of conflicting secular and personal laws that govern them. Particularly, I am interested in the role of law in the queering of the traditional family contract. As families around the globe begin to look increasingly different, how does law offer them adequate power and protection?