Associate Professor Purnima Mankekar has been Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA and the recipient of a distinguished Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Senior Fulbright Award. Her first book, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (1999, Durham, N.C.: Duke), was an innovative feminist ethnography which connected images of woman and the nation in Indian television. It received the Kovacs award in cinema studies. She has more recently been examining mass-mediated racial violence against South Asian Americans since September 11 and transnational dimensions of media and sexuality in Asia. Her most recent book, Media, Erotics and Transnational Asia co-edited with Louisa Schein (2013, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press) will be the basis of her public lecture.

Purnima draws on collaborative research on intersections of transnational media, erotics, and identity within Asia and across Asian diasporas. While the global traffic in images and texts across Asia and its diasporas is hardly a new phenomenon, the past few decades have witnessed monumental changes in the scale and reach of transnational media. These media include highly amateur and grassroots forms to professional and globally dominant forms and range from cinema, radio, satellite television, popular novels, and “self health” literature, to video, the Internet, and zines. Mediated erotics are both embedded within and constitute sociality at the present historical moment. What are the myriad ways in which media implicate cognition, affect, and the body?

This event is supported by the ANU Gender Institute

Light refreshments will also be served before the lecture.

Access: Free and open to the Public