Vanita Reddy
  • Associate Professor
Scholars@TAMU
Research Areas
  • Theory
  • Transnational Literatures
  • Race and Ethnicity Studies
  • African American and African Diaspora Literature
  • Contemporary
  • Asian American and Asian Diaspora
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Multi-Ethnic Literature
  • 20th-Century American

Biography

Professional Links

Research Interests

Vanita Reddy is a feminist scholar and cultural critic whose research focuses on the intersections of race, sexuality, and gender in global contexts. Dr. Reddy’s research focuses on practices of cultural identity, social belonging, and political community within the South Asian American and the global South Asian diaspora. It seeks to make visible subjects and populations who have occupied a historically marginal place within studies of diaspora and globalization, such as women, girls, service sector workers, undocumented migrants, and sexual minorities.

 

Research Areas

  • Theory
  • Transnational Literatures
  • Race and Ethnicity Studies
  • African American and African Diaspora Literature
  • Contemporary
  • Asian American and Asian Diaspora
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Multi-Ethnic Literature
  • 20th-Century American

Educational Background

  • Ph.D., University of California-Davis, 2009
  • M.A., University of California-Davis, 2002
  • B.A., Trinity University, 1998

Awards & Honors

  • 2018-2021 Arts and Humanities Fellow ($5,000/year for 3 years)
  • Glasscock Internal Faculty Fellow (two-course teaching release for Fall 2018)
  • Collaborative Grant, Lead Author, Glasscock Center for the Humanities, Fall 2016, $1,500 (with Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Sociology, and Jyotsna Vaid, Psychology)
  • Aggie Allies Rainbow Award for Accountability, Climate, and Equity (ACE) (TAMU, Department of Multicultural Services), 2016
  • TAMU ADVANCE Scholar, 2015-2017
  • Postdoctoral Fellowship, Indiana University, Bloomington, Department of Gender Studies, 2013-14
  • Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant, TAMU Division of Research, 2011-2012 academic year, 2011

Selected Publications


  • Reddy, Vanita.  Fashioning Diaspora:  Beauty, Feminity, and South Asia American Culture. Temple University Press, 2016

    Examining literature, film, video, visual art, and digital media, Fashioning Diaspora argues that beauty and fashion articulate South Asian American racial formations and cultural identities through embodied practices of citizenship and belonging. It shows that diasporic subjects’ encounters with and material uses of Indian beauty and fashion produce embodiments and social connections that put pressure on neoliberal practices of national and transnational belonging. Beauty and fashion, it argues, are not simply as dematerialized, overly commodified cultural practices that work seamlessly in the interests of globalizing capital but are social domains that can be radically material.

    Link to Book Talk 



    Other Publications

    • “Femme Migritude: Shailja Patel’s Afro-Asian Poetics,” The Minnesota Review 94 (2020): 67-84.
    • “Feminine Vulnerability and Toxic Masculinity: A Comparative Feminist Analysis of #MeToo,” Rejoinder 4 (Spring 2019) (with Chaitanya Lakkimsetti).
    • “Family Togetherness, Affect Aliens, and the Ugly Feelings of Being Included,” Feminist and Queer Theory Reader, eds. L. Ayu Saraswati and Barbara Shaw. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019.
    • “Introduction: Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations,” The Scholar and Feminist Online (March 2018), with Anantha Sudhakar
    •  “Affect, Aesthetics, and Afro-Asian Studies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20.2 (June 2017): 289-294.
    •  “Diasporic Beauty and Fashionability,” Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora, eds. Radha Hedge and Ajaya Sahoo. New York and London: Routledge, 2017: 183-199.  
    • “Afro-Asian Intimacies and the Politics of Cross-Racial Struggle in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala. Journal of Asian American Studies.18.3 (Fall 2015): 233-63.
    • “Jhumpa Lahiri’s Feminist Cosmopolitics and the Transnational Beauty Assemblage.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. 11.2 (Spring 2013): 29-59.
    • “Beauty and the Limits of Belonging in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine,” Contemporary Literature. 54.2 (Summer 2013): 337-68.
    • “Come for the Saris, Stay for the Politics.” Migritude. Shailja Patel. Kaya Press: New York, 2010. 141-47.
    •  “The Nationalization of the Global Indian Woman: Geographies of Beauty in Femina,” Journal of South Asian Popular Culture (Spring 2006): 61-85.

     

    Other Publications (Selected)

    • “Afro-Asian Femme Aesthetics in Anti-Colorism Campaigns” Verge: Studies in Global Asias (forthcoming)
    • “Fashion Modeling, Risk, and Muslim Chic in Kavita Daswani’s Salaam, Paris” (forthcoming for Fashion and Literature, Cambridge UP, Critical Concepts Series 2024)
    • “Beauty, Colorism, and Anti-Colorism in Transnational India.” Beauty Politics, edited by Maxine Craig, Routledge, 2021, pp. 94-102.
    • Dossier for Feminist Formations, “#MeToo and the Transnational Gender Justice,” with Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, vol. 33, no. 3, 2021. “Queer South Asian Desire, Blackness, and the Apartheid State.” Queer and Asian 2.0, edited by Kale Fajardo, Alice Hom, and Martin Manalansan, Temple UP, 2021, pp. 112-122.
    • “Family Togetherness, Affect Aliens, and the Ugly Feelings of Being Included,” Feminist and Queer Theory Reader, eds. L. Ayu Saraswati and Barbara Shaw. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019.
    • Special Issue of Scholar and Feminist Online on “Afro-Asian Feminist and Queer Formations,” with Anantha Sudhakar. vol. 14, no. 3, 2018: https://sfonline.barnard.edu/feminist-and-queer-afro-asian-formations/
    • “Affect, Aesthetics, and Afro-Asian Studies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 20.2 (June 2017): 289-294.
    • “Diasporic Beauty and Fashionability,” Routledge Handbook of the Indian Diaspora, eds. Radha Hedge and Ajaya Sahoo. New York and London: Routledge, 2017: 183-199.
    • “Afro-Asian Intimacies and the Politics of Cross-Racial Struggle in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala. Journal of Asian American Studies.18.3 (Fall 2015): 233-63.
    • “Jhumpa Lahiri’s Feminist Cosmopolitics and the Transnational Beauty Assemblage.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism. 11.2 (Spring 2013): 29-59.
    • “Beauty and the Limits of Belonging in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine,” Contemporary Literature. 54.2 (Summer 2013): 337-68.
Scholars@TAMU