Hello, everyone. I am back and I am so delighted to introduce our guest, Dr. Nishant Upadhyay. Dr. Upadhyay is a professor of critical ethnic studies, Asian-American studies, queer and trans of color critiques, and of sexual and trans national feminism, anti-colonial and decolonial thinking, and settler colonialism studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Their dissertation received the National Women's Studies Association, University of Illinois pressed First Book Award of 2018. Their book manuscript, Indians on Indian Land, Transnational Intersections of Race, Caste and Indigeneity, studies the formation of dominant caste and do Indian diasporas in North America and Indian diaspora complicities and processes of settler colonialism and anti- blackness, Islamophobia, I always have trouble pronouncing this word, I'm sorry, but ecumenical supremacy. Dr. Upadhyay, I'd like to ask you, how do you interpret inter-sectional, and trans national identity? I'm asking that because I feel these are contexts of self-hood that many folk cope with but do not actually have a clear understanding of how to verify them. Yeah, that's a really important question that comes up in my classes all the time. The first thing I'd like to begin when I'm thinking about intersectionality is that, these are not questions of identity but these are questions of structure of oppression. That's how black feminist from Kimberly Kim show, Patricia Hill Collins, Bell Hooks, Audre Lorde, that's how they started theorizing this. This is not the question of how inter-sexual are, we as individuals, but how do we face the world in these inter-sectional structures of power, domination, oppression. Some of those get published through those structures and some of us get oppressed through those structures. Often, we embody so many different identities that some identities can make us privileged and some may make us oppressed through the structures. The structures that black feminist are theorizing, looking at the lives of black women, specifically in relationship to white women and black men. For them to understand black women's experiences, it was looking at white supremacy, racism, patriarchy and capitalism. That they said that none of these structures, we cannot understand black women's experiences in the world solely by looking at one structure. Either all these three things that come in together that shape how black women are treated in this world, especially in the North American context. Thinking about the legacy of enslavement and ongoing process, the kind of blackness that black women exist in this world, usually resisting fighting the structures of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism. It's not that black women have inter-sectional identities, it's black women peace inter-sectional oppression. What they mean by saying that intersectional oppression is that we can isolate one thing that say, in this instance, someone was being racist to them and this instance someone was being closest to them and then this instance someone was being patriarchal to them. It's a combination of all three of those experiences that black women face. Then later in conversation with Chicano-Latina women and women of color feminism, they all came up with this idea that women of color have experiences, especially in the global north or North American context cannot be just understood by patriarchy. That's what white feminism was doing at that time. In the '60s, '70s, '80s, even now that white women feminism was about women are subjugated to men. We live in a patriarchal society that women live in a patriarchal society and men are on top and women at the bottom. They were trying to create this idea of universal sisterhood or universal suffrage that women have and that's when black women, Latina, Chicano, indigenous, Asian-American and other women of color started critiquing those ideas that no, all women are not equally oppressed. Women are divided through these structures of race, and class, and gender, and sexuality, and nationality, and religion, and and other axes. We can say that all women are equally oppressed. White women actually get privilege to white supremacy. To understand women of color's expediencies, we have to think about different sections more critically and to understand that how white women get privilege through racism and often men of color privileged through patriarchy. Women of color; their experiences are very unique and even women of color is a much broader term, basically we have to be specific in terms of thinking about black, indigenous, Chicano, Latina, Asian-American, Muslim women differently. But generally, we can say that not all women are equally oppressed, and race shapes women of color's experiences in this world. That's the first thing that I want to say, that these are not identity per sec, but these are structures that we face. I can think that women of color feminism have taught us is that, these identities are not biological, because these are structure we're talking about, these structures create these identities. What is the socially constructed of what most feminist do with the gender, the socially construct that we have. Nothing is biological about gender. We are taught about gender as we grow, we are told boys like blue and girls like pink, and then girls can only become nurses and boys can only become engineers or whatever, that's how we are taught about the society. There's nothing innate or essential in our gender identity but what we've been taught by the society, so that makes it socially constructed. Similarly, the idea of a race and not nothing is biological about race, other than the pigment on our skin, which gives us all different skin colors. There's nothing else that defines race. Race has been an idea that was constructed by white European men when they started going colonizing the world, that they started seeing that we are better than others. We are better than black people in Africa, we are better than brown people in Asia, we are better than indigenous people in the Americas, and that we will be at the top of the structure of white supremacy that they created. They saw the color of the skin and then said that since we are white, we are better. There's no logic to that. If we actually look into race, there are more differences between people of one color, one racial group, rather than differences across racial groups, biologically speaking. What's happening internally in our bodies? What kind of diseases are people prone to? What kind of different biological mechanisms in the body? We see that there are actually more differences within each racial group rather than across racial groups. Race was socially constructed or colonially constructed by Europeans, and that we've been living in that structure for 500 years now. That was a myth that was constructed to keep saying that white men are better than everyone else. Then 500 years later, we're still in that process. Even if it's a myth, racism is not a myth, racism is material, and people face violence, often people are killed because of that. Race, gender, sexuality, class, these are all socially constructed identities which are constructed through processes of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and whatnot. We have to be very careful, in how do we talk about these identities, but also how do we talk about these identities on ourselves. It's not that someone who identifies as a woman, is always going to be oppressed through those lotteries. It's a society that's putting this oppressive logic on the woman's body or someone who's black or brown. It's a society that treats them as black, and brown, and then that shapes people's experiences through that. It is about some effort in trying to understand how we live in this world, but it's also important too at the same time to know that these are constructed by us. By us, I mean to be part of the structures of power that they've been constructed over 500 years, that we face the world through that. Does that help? Yeah. That helps tremendously. There were so many important things that were said, but I'd like to just pick out one. That was the fact that you talked about structures as opposed to identities and events because when we talk about events, first, and foremost, we're talking about something that's happened, and that's over. When you talk about structures, we're talking about these perpetuating and ongoing systems, and that couldn't be more true, and I think that that's what many people in our societies need to hear, and understand that these are structures, they're bigger, and grander than any event because they haven't ended, they're still going. You pointed out 500 years that we've been living in these structures, and the fact that these processes are ongoing, that intersectionality is an identity there are structures that we're all having to navigate, we all meaning particularly, non-white folk. I just think that's a really important designation to make, and I really appreciate that. I want to ask, can you speak, and again in whatever length about queer and trans color of critique, and why this is an important topic and issue to comprehend, particularly in today's hyper patriarchal, hyper misogynist, hyper homophobic, trans-phobic societies? Queer of color and trans of color critiques come out of feminism, the color, the one that I cited previously, like Black feminist, Chicano, Latina feminist, Asian-American feminist, Muslim feminists, and feminists from the global south. We feel that way of talking about intersectionality that allowed for queer folks, queer scholars, activists, and artists to start thinking about their identity through those intersections. We do live in a very heteronormative, heteropecrative world, and for queer people, their expediencies are shaped through that. What is homophobia is a manifestation of heteronormative world that we live in. To understand homophobia, we have to understand how gender and sexuality have been imposed on us. Again, we talk about sexuality as if we are born with this, but because our desires are about who are used to be about gender, and identity are socially constructed, so our desires are also socially constructed that no matter where we fall on the spectrum of sexuality, or desires, or orientation, it's not something just innate that we're told that we will become this. We see the clues from the world that we then see what we find reliable. Everything we see outside our body is socially constructed, so then sexuality is also socially constructed through those logics. What queer of color critique started pointing out was that like a game following the lines of women of color feminism, that all queer people are not equally oppressed. White gay men's experiences are very different from queer men of color or queer women of color, and that we have to identify those differences. Differences are important to acknowledge. People often think about differences as something that, oh we can work together now or we can't be in the same community now. But what women of color feminism, queer of color critiques have told us is that differences can actually bring this together. Audre Lorde has this amazing line that I'm going to paraphrase now, but it's something along the lines about differences. Differences should not be breaking the community, but differences should be bringing us together, because these differences are socially constructed, that they should not be dividing us. To fight oppression, we have to come together through these different intersections of our identities. What one of the main things of queer of color critique has been offering for the last few decades is that we have to understand these differences, but also that we have to understand them and these differences to then work together to change life of queer people of color, but also what other people who are marginalized, oppressed in these different intersections. The main thing was different, I think that's what I take from queer of color critiques. The second thing was this like the critique of heteronormativity to understand heteronormativity in communities of color, to understand that these colonial ideas of gender and sexuality, of gender binary, of heteronormativity, which have been imposed on communities of color through colonization and white supremacy, and that we have to think about ways of undoing them so that queer people of color are not oppressed within the communities. Queer people of color, because they often the ideas that the white queer spaces are racist, so they feel oppressed in those communities, and then their communities of color are homophobic and plan-phobic, so they can be in those places either. Where do queer folks of color go, and how do they build their communities and their lives? What they have offered us in the last few decades is to be astronomic with it, but also to see the relationship between the nation and the family, that nation queer of color critiques has been very, I don't want to say obsessed, but has been very determined, I guess, in some ways to critique the nation and to understand how nation-states keeps producing heteropatriarchy, homophobia, heteronormativity, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and whatnot, because they can't fit in their family often and they can't create families, but often with white queer folks and like I said, limited, historically have been isolated from these communities, they have given us the tools to understand that family often works at the structure or violence. There's nothing safe about families, there's nothing biological about family, the way family gets celebrated in a societies that family can actually be the most violent structure for a lot of queer and trans people of color. We have to understand family through the logic of gender, sexuality, patriarchy, and race, and class, to understand that those structures can be very violent and that we have to figure out ways to undo that violence. Once we start understanding family like that then we can also start seeing the nation state is also built, on those logics, that patriarchy runs from the head of the family to the head of nation states, that this country is still struggling to find a woman to be the president speaks to how deeply embedded these patriarch logics are from the smallest unit of the family to the largest unit of the nation state. Queer of color critics continue to offer us critiques of the nation state that there's nothing natural about a nation state. Even nation states have been built through procedures like colonialism, genocide, slavery and enslavement, and imperial capitalist expansion across the world, especially the US in this context that I'm talking about. Oppressive structures and that we can also have to work towards dismantling them. That's generally what I take from Queer color critique, but to add to that, Trans of color critiques are in some ways we would think of. I reproduce that to women of color feminism's, Queer color critiques, and then Trans of color critiques. Yes. We have created this like some linear understanding of how the item have come into being and how those critical lenses have been offered. In that linear sense of time, we think of Trans of color critique as something that I've just come now in the last 5-10 years and they're offering a lot of critiques and that it has learned from, queer of color critiques in women of color feminism. They have been foundational, but also that it's high time that queer of color critiques among women of color feminism. Also such learning back from time of color critique and actually learning what is gender? We've been stuck on this idea of gender binary forever. But the feminist scholarship and queer scholarship that even though we can say gender is socially constructed and the logics of gender are oppressive, we haven't really unpacked what gender is the way Trans Theory generally and Trans of Color theory is offering now to telling us that gender is actually not even socially constructed like this. This whole thing is not just about going beyond gender, but it's actually questioning the logics of how we have created the society in this way of that gender only exists in the binary [inaudible]. Then we can only live in this binary and that this is actually a manifestation of what colonialism has done, because we see in other societies in the global South especially, but also in the indigenous context in the Americas, that a lot of these communities have too many expansive understanding of what gender is. They were not limited to a man being a man and a woman being a woman that other people could exist in that spectrum or beyond that spectrum. It was the European ideas of what gender is that has been imposed on us globally, not just in the North American context of Western European context, but actually globally at this point. Trans of color offers us tools to not just understand gender, but also understand colonialism in ways that we have not been able to understand colonialism before that how pervasive colonial ideology thought and how we have created these ideas and enforce these ideas of gender binary on communities of color which had different understandings of gender. They were expensive in many ways. But this is not to say that transphobia did not exist or that people did not work, not within the binary were not oppressed. They might have been oppressed. They might not have been oppressed. But that's not the question. The question is that they existed. But in the Western colonial mind frame, [inaudible] is of lifting up other communities racialized called Mycenae response people have always existed perhaps what we call France. Every community has to have different names, different ways. They were part of the communities, different ways they were outside the community. But in the many examples of how they were integrated into the society. To understand gender from that lens challenges not just white and colonial logics of patriarchy, but also logics within women of color, feminisms and queer of color critiques to unpack that and go beyond that. It also gives us visions of liberation, unlike queer of color critiques. If I can say that, it's a bold statement to make, but I think it does give us visions of liberation for all. If he starts entering trans, especially drawn to women of color experiences, if you start learning about the intersections of oppression that comes from [inaudible] face that frontwoman of color in this country especially have the lowest life span and one of the lowest in the world, tells us how pervasive this logic side and how [inaudible] are often left on the streets with no support structures around them. It's a very structural violence which is shaped to racism, patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, ableism, that pushes trans women of color to the fringes of the society. To start imagining a world that they can live as freely as others would require a drastic change in that world. Requiring that drastic shift is a liberation factor. This is a practice of the colonial abolition which draws upon [inaudible] thinking to envision futures where people who are the nonconforming, especially if they're feminine and racialize and colonized. We can imagine a different world through their lenses, through the experiences of what they have gone through. Along with all of this, I think what would queer of color and trans of color critiques offer is also an understanding of what disability is, which is often left out in theory, we're going to follow feminisms because we have assumed we have reproduced logic of fatalism. I think it's the work of mostly queer and trans of color scholars that we are coming to an understanding that ableism is also as pervasive of a violent structure as racism and patriarchy and colonialism is. These are in some ways we can call them [inaudible] conversations, but most of the [inaudible] that was happening by people we would call our elders in some ways of the Lord and so the end of the war. They were also disabled through these logics of abuse and ended that realization of that experience of their [inaudible] of color. Ableism was always part of that analysis and so which had been left out of more masculine political institutions, but also left out of women of color feminism often. I think it's now through the intervention that queer and trans of color critique have meant that we can start seeing disability and ableism as structures that affect us all, not just people who we would call people with "disabilities" [inaudible]. Obviously, there are lives that definitely shape the structure of capitalism, but also people who are able-bodied. What we understand about able-bodiedness are logics of colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism that are manifested on our bodies. I think that's a really important contribution that queer of color critique have made in the last 10 years or maybe two decades. The last thing I want to talk about is thinking about questions of love, desire, and sex. I think those are questions we often leave out in our political discussions about oppression, because they're supposed to be outside love, sex, desire, joy, and pleasure. It all takes things that are outside of oppression often. But these are also things structured through oppression, structured through logics of white supremacy, colonialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, nationalism, and whatnot. What in particular critiques generally offered us is tools to think about these things about our most intimate experience desires, most intimate forms of love that we express in our lives, and how these are structured through these logics of violences and that often queer people of color cannot act on their desires and think about pleasure, or love, or sex. But if we start thinking about those things and creating a space for them in these academic conversations, or activist spaces, or just conversations about changing the world, I think centering those conversations can lead us to a world where we can all freely express who we are and fight the structures through coming together, through sex, through love, through pleasure, through joy, through desire, through erotics which have been criticized by people like Baudrillard to falling on record by so many people in the last 30 years. They gave us the tools to actually imagine the world through love and through desire, which is often left out in other critical conversations in the academy when they think about oppression. I guess I'll stop at that. I was going to ask, I should say, a final question, but there's no need to because you completely answered that. I was going to ask you if you can offer any resolutions as to how we as individuals, communities, and societies can begin to deconstruct our fears around having open, fruitful conversations about gender, race, sexuality, class, ableism, so on and so forth, but you did all of that. You laid out what we have in place, particularly the importance of engagement in women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, engagement in ableism, and studies of ableist notions and how ableism actually can be challenged through really looking at transgenderism and queer color critique, and that's so important to think about. I really appreciate how you brought the whole idea of family as being a central perpetuation of a lot of the violences that many folk are actually experiencing, because family, again, is looked at as one of those very founding principles of values, if you will, of the nation state. As you pointed out many times, these values of the nation state are the very things that need to be re-evaluated. The way that we can re-evaluate those values is by really looking at the way we've perpetuated violence particularly upon people who are operating outside of sexual and gender binaries, and even those who are working within the gender and sexual binaries as well. Those that are being placed within these very difficult structures of operation by white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, not just white supremacy and white heteropatriarchy, but African-American heteropatriarchy as well, or whatever ethnicity you designate as, but just systems of heteropatriarchy in general that need to be challenged, that perpetuates these systems of violence and these structures of violence, if you will, that many of us continue to have to navigate through making lives very difficult, making our ability to cohabitate in societies very, very difficult. But, yeah, you answered all of that completely, and you did it very, very eloquently about topics that aren't spoken about enough that we can't just sit and have very open conversations about these systems of oppression and about how do we start to unpack and deconstruct these structures of gender sexual binaries and its attachment to racism as well.
