Auntylectuals: a nonce taxonomy of aunty-power

Abstract

ABSTRACT South Asian aunties are responsible for gatekeeping in the social relations of caste-based heteropatriarchal families and in white supremacist academia. Through collective performative writing, we name the category of aunty-power, exploring its possibilities for upending the hegemonies that persist in South Asian culture, and in South Asian Studies. We are acutely aware of the need to resist Hindutva and Islamophobia and interrogate what is at stake in South Asian invocations of “aunty.” We present a reconceptualization of the aunty as subject through the figure of the auntylectual, our attempt to imagine a potentially transformative feminist figure who challenges these hierarchies.