As a part of the Global South Gender and Sexuality Studies Collective Series, Professor Durba Mitra (Harvard) will be giving a talk titled "Third World Feminism and the Crisis of Authoritarianism".

Abstract: This talk offers a glimpse into the vast intellectual history of Third World feminisms in the decolonizing world in the 1970s and 1980s. I critically engage the possibilities and limits of the feminist epistemological revolution that emerged in the dark shadow of an earlier era of utopian internationalism, globalism, and non-alignment of the 1950s and 1960s. Third World feminists created a new internationalist imaginary in response to widespread disenchantment in the decolonizing world with the nationalist project and rising neocolonial governments bolstered by economic and military interventions. Women seized the means of knowledge production, critiquing postcolonial inequality and rising authoritarianisms by imagining radically just visions of the future.

Speaker Bio: Durba Mitra is Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University and author of Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020). Mitra works on the history of sexuality and epistemology in South Asia and the comparative colonial and post-colonial world. Mitra’s current book project, The Future That Was: Feminist Thought in the Decolonizing World, analyzes the history of Third World feminist thought and South-South solidarity networks.