Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality - Ashoka University

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Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality - Ashoka University

CSGS is the first Centre in the country to conduct research in both gender and sexuality, combining academic rigour with activism and media consultation.

Gender and sexuality are policed, enforced, and celebrated in every society in the world. They are issues of universal import that also take on different flavours depending on their local setting. In India, the policing of gender and sexuality forms the cornerstone of many inequalities perpetrated in society. The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) at Ashoka University is the first-o

f-its-kind Centre in the country to study the nuances of these issues concerning both gender and sexuality. Set in the inter-disciplinary Liberal Arts context of Ashoka University, the Centre will address the issues in study of gender and sexuality through scholarly, policy, and media approaches focusing with rigour on these inter-related issues. CSGS sees itself as fulfilling this global requirement while being fully responsive to local needs. The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University was set up in August 2015 and focuses on three areas of activity: scholarly research, social outreach, and media consultation. Centre's prime focus on research will be manifested in a range of activities, including but not limited to offering Major and Minor programs in Gender Studies and Sexuality Studies to students, housing research projects, and organizing seminars, international conferences and exchange programmes. CSGS also aims at ensuring dissemination of research to all levels, from the grassroots to the government. This includes developing anti-sexist and anti-homphobic workshops that can be presented at various organizations, including schools and colleges. Centre will also focus on providing information to media outlets from around the world who want to focus on issues of gender and sexuality in India. Apart from writing extensively for digital and print media, CSGS also hopes to provide archival resources for cutting-edge information on gender and sexuality. For more details on our activities and projects, contact us at [email protected]

Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/CSGS_Ashoka

Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/csgs_ashoka/

08/05/2026

The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality is happy to announce that the Summer Internship Programme 2026 is now open!

The Centre is calling for student applications for a wide range of internship projects relating to gender, sexuality, and their intersections. This year, we have a diverse set of internships that would be of interest to students across the academic spectrum.

Please read the brochure linked in bio carefully to learn of the available projects conceptualized by Ashoka faculty members, as well as organisations that work on the ground.

These opportunities are ideal for students who wish to understand how gender and sexuality interact with a diversity of disciplines, experiences and fields of inquiry, outside of their classrooms.

The duration of the internship is from 1 June 2026 to 1 August 2026 (two months). We will be providing each intern with a stipend of INR 10,000 per month. The deadline for all applications is May 17th, Sunday.

All applications must be submitted through a single Google form linked in the brochure -- we won't be able to accept applications over email.

In case of any queries, please write to us at [email protected].

24/04/2026

🚨 Attention Organizations and Faculty! 🚨

The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University will soon be rolling out its summer internship programme for 2026. We are inviting proposals by organizations for projects that would benefit by having a short-term intern on board, and in turn, provide an enriching hands-on experience for the student interns.

We will facilitate pairing a professional with a suitable student who would work with them in the capacity of an intern for two months in the summer (June-July 2026).

If interested, please send in your project proposals by April 30 latest to [email protected]. Please note that we can accommodate 5 projects with 10 interns total (2 per project).

23/04/2026

4 DAYS TO GO!

Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality is pleased to invite you to 'Parde Ke Peeche Kya Hai? Cinema, Desire and Fantasy', on April 27, a day full of cinema and conversation. Read more to get the full schedule 👇👇

Join us for a special screening of:
🎞 City Girls (by Priya Thuvassery The Third Eye Films)
🎞 My Other Self is Plastic (by Khushi Bano, The Third Eye Films)
🎞 Mandi (by Yashovardhan Mishra)
🎞 Ebb (by Jeo Baby)

The screenings will be followed by lunch for the audience 🍛

The event will conclude with a panel discussion featuring Jeo Baby, Shabani Hassanwalia, and Yashowardhan Mishra on cinema and desire, moderated by Ananya Dasgupta. With the panel, we will interrogate how cinema produces, manages and circulates desires. We will engage with films, not just as a platform for representation, but as an affective machinery that, in conversation with society, culture and the law, negotiates with legible and illegible desires.

SCHEDULE

12 PM - Screening of City Girls (2021)

12.40 PM - Screening of My Other Self is Plastic (2025)

12.55 PM - Screening of Mandi (2019)

1.15 PM - Screening of Ebb (2025)

--- LUNCH---

3.30 PM - 5.30 PM - Panel Discussion and Q&A with Jeo Baby, Shabani Hassanwalia, and Yashowardhan Mishra

⭐ Venue: AC01 LR-207

We hope to see you there!

18/04/2026

CSGS is pleased to invite you to "Parde Ke Peeche Kya Hai? Cinema, Desire and Fantasy", on April 27, a day full of films and conversation.

We are screening City Girls (by Priya Thuvassery, The Third Eye Films), My Other Self is Plastic (by Khushi Bano, The Third Eye Films), Mandi (by Yashovardhan Mishra) and Ebb (by Jeo Baby).

We are also hosting filmmakers Jeo Baby, Shabani Hassanwalia and Yashowardhan Mishra for a panel discussion on cinema and desire, moderated by Ananya Dasgupta.

With the panel, we will interrogate how cinema produces, manages and circulates desires. We will engage with films, not just as a platform for representation, but as an affective machinery that, in conversation with society, culture and the law, negotiates with legible and illegible desires.

⭐Time: 12 PM to 5 PM, April 27
⭐Venue: AC01 LR-207

Ananya Dasgupta is a Writing Faculty, of Critical Inquiry and Expression at the Young India Fellowship. She is a student of literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. She studied English Literature at Jadavpur University before working on her doctoral thesis at IIT Bombay and Monash University.

Jeo Baby is known for his incisive explorations of family, gender, and everyday life. His films include 2 Penkuttikal (2016), Kilometers and Kilometers (2020), The Great Indian Kitchen (2021), Freedom Fight (2022), and Kaathal – The Core (2023). The Great Indian Kitchen received widespread critical acclaim and won several honours, including the Kerala State Film Award for Best Film with Popular Appeal and recognition at multiple international film festivals.

Shabani Hassanwalia is a writer and a filmmaker, and producer at The Third Eye. Her feature documentaries include Being Bhaijaan (2014), Gali (2017), and Out of Thin Air (2009), which played on MUBI and won multiple national and international festivals.

Yashowardhan Mishra’s film Kathal: A Jackfruit Mystery (2023) won the Best Hindi Film award at the 71st National Film Awards, marking his emergence as a distinctive new voice in Hindi cinema. His work blends satire and social realism, often exploring class and gender dynamics in small-town India.

17/04/2026

Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality is delighted to invite you to a lecture by Rama Devi titled ‘Who is Afraid of Love? Gender, Caste, Faith and Marriage’. The lecture is a part of our flagship series ISHQ (Issues in Society, History and Q***rness) and will take place on April 22, 1.30 PM at AC-04 LR 302.

This talk will critically engage with the questions of whether the abstract/transcendental conception of love meets and matches the reality of the world around us. Can we really love and marry the one or those we share an amorous bond with? Or is the “choice” to love and marry shadowed and defined by the social norms (caste rules) and expectations? Is it possible to discount the gender dynamics, sexuality, and baggage of our historical identities in amorous-marital relationships? How does society respond to the transgressions of norms that guide marriage? What forms of social anxieties are revealed through resistance to amorous-marital relationships? By focusing on inter-caste romantic and marital relationships, the talk will trace the changes in the durable institution of marriage and the limits of these changes. It will delineate how the notions of honor, shame, disgrace, choice, purity, contamination, desire, and intimacy are negotiated as the institution is met with inescapable changes.

Rama Devi is a sociologist whose research focuses on contemporary caste, and urban Dalit lives. She is a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre De Sciences and Humaines (CSH), Delhi. Previously, she taught social science courses at KREA University. Her research work and opinion pieces have been published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Sociological Bulletin, LSE Blogs, and Economic and Political Weekly. Her monograph Caste and Emancipatory Quest: Ethnography of Dalit Lives in an Urban Neighborhood (2025) unravels the entangled relationship between ascriptive identity (caste) and space (urban) and how this interaction (re)moulds urban stratification.

We hope to see you there!

02/04/2026

The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality, The Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Centre for China Studies are delighted to present a talk titled, “Scenting Sapphic Elegance and Q***r Promises: Advertisements for Amaryllis du Japon (1891–94),” by Professor Hyoungee Kong from NYU-Shanghai.

The talk will take place on 6th April in AC-02 LR-206 from 1:30 PM to 3 PM. This talk examines the advertising campaign for Amaryllis du Japon, the signature fragrance of the perfumery Delettrez at the fin de siècle, as a case study of the ho******ic dynamics of visual culture for middle-class women of the period. Prof Kong argues that the campaign’s central motif, the kimono-clad coquette, seduced female viewers and prospective consumers by evoking the intersecting discourses on Japanese femininity, floral scents, and olfactory arousal.

The japonesque coquette promised exotic pleasures associated with the sapphic sensuality attributed to fashionable Parisiennes, both real and imagined. In her talk, Prof. Kong will use an analytical framework that ventures outside a heteronormative construction of female spectatorship and demonstrates the advertising campaign’s ho******ic appeal as well as a period concern for it.

29/03/2026

The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality is delighted to invite registrations for a photography workshop facilitated by at Ashoka University on April 6th and 7th.

Vasudhaa Narayanan is an artist and educator whose practice engages with gender, domesticity, and the body through photography, text, sculpture, and performance. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Halden Bookworks (Norway), Southern Exposure (San Francisco, CA) and more.

Drawing from her ongoing body of work titled, “spoiled fruit,” participants will be invited to reflect on how experiences of gender are lived and remembered through the body, and how these experiences might be translated into visual form. Through discussion, collaborative exercises, and visual experimentation, participants will explore how images can function as tools for reflection, inquiry, and personal narrative form.

Open to students from across disciplines, the workshop creates a space to collectively examine how visual practices take shape, and can potentially transform the act of looking.

🗓️ 6th and 7th April, 2026

Register through the QR code above or the link in bio. This workshop is limited to 15 spots only, on a first-come, first-serve basis. The lecture on day 2 (7th April, 6 pm to 7.30 pm) is open to all.

20/03/2026

The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) invites submissions for Qurbatein, its bi-annual publication. Issue 6 is themed as, “Intimate Appetites.”

This issue asks to implore how food and food making can function as an erotic and intimate practice facilitating alternative and q***r modes of kinship.

Submissions close on 20 April 2026. Link with concept note and submission form in bio.

15/03/2026

Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality invites you to a special screening of the film, “If You Dare Desire…/Aabar Jadi Iccha Karo…“ by this Thursday, 19th March. Debalina Majumder is a Kolkata-based filmmaker, cinematographer, photographer and media producer. This film explores alternate realities to two women’s tragic love story.

🗓️: 19 March
⏰: 1.30 - 3 PM
📍: AC-02 LR-013

In 2011, in a small village in West Bengal, two young women in love—Swapna and Shucheta—took their own lives. None of their family members came to claim their bodies. They remained unclaimed. But what if they had not died? What if they had chosen otherwise? “If You Dare Desire…” imagines these possibilities. Within a hetero‑patriarchal world, women resist through their bodies, their hearts, their love, and their desires. They live many lives and die many deaths. Through this living and dying, they continue to love, resist, dream, and create new families and new spaces of belonging. These lives unfold across a distant village, the dark glitter of a big city, and the uncertain spaces in between. The film imagines a hyper‑reality of desire and a politics of hope where resistance emerges
through love, longing, and everyday survival.

We hope to see you at the screening!

23/02/2026

The Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology are proud to host ‘Between Fields and Flyovers: Stories from Delhi’s Urban Edges?’ – a talk by Professor Ekta Chouhan.

Through everyday stories of local women navigating intensified surveillance and restricted mobility, of young students from outside negotiating visibility, desire, and vulnerability, and of families responding to rapid change by tightening control over land and lineage, Prof Chouhan explores how rural–urban interaction becomes deeply gendered. As campuses, gated housing, and new economies emerge, older patriarchal hierarchies do not disappear; they adapt, harden, and sometimes reassert themselves.

This talk is a journey through the villages at Delhi’s edge, where the city does not simply arrive but collides with existing rural worlds. Drawing from her book Sheher Mein Gaon and long-term fieldwork in Sonipat, Haryana, she reflects on what happens when urban expansion is layered onto agrarian life rather than replacing it.

🗓️ 26 Feb 2026, Thursday
⏰ 1:30 PM IST Onwards
📍 AC-02-LR-107 (Hybrid; Scan QR)

*This talk will be held in hybrid mode, please scan the QR code in the poster to join online. We’re happy to have you with us!

Ekta Chauhan is Assistant Professor at OP Jindal Global University, with expertise in Urban studies, Heritage, History, Visual Culture, Anthropology, and Memory studies.

02/02/2026

Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality invites you to ‘Are You a Man or a Mouse?’ – a talk by Professor Stefan Horlacher.

This talk offers a critical survey of where Masculinity Studies are after roughly forty years since their inception. It examines the concept of masculinity itself and interrogates the almost mythological notion of masculinity in perpetual crisis. Drawing on psychoanalytical as well as deconstructive, narratological, intersectional and comparative approaches, the presentation discusses how these frameworks contribute to a better understanding of masculinity, i.e. what ‘they allow us to conceive’ but also what ‘they hinder us from conceiving.’

🗓️ 6 Feb 2026 (5.30 PM- 7 PM)
📍 AC-04-LR-004

This talk is part of ISHQ: Issues in Society, History and Q***rness, a flagship lecture series by CSGS.

Stefan Horlacher is the Chair of English Literature at Dresden University of Technology, Germany. He has held guest professorships in India, Sri Lanka, Poland, Italy, Malta and the US. His publications comprise his prize-winning Conceptions of Masculinity in the Works of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence (2006, in German), Taboo and Transgression in British Literature (2010), Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice (2015), Transgender and Intersex: Theoretical, Practical, and Artistic Perspectives (2016; revised and expanded edition 2026), Masculinities: An International Handbook (2016, in German), Contemporary Masculinities in the UK and the US (2017), GenderGraduateProjects V – Women’s Movements, Q***rness/Intersex, Feminist Po*******hy (2021, in German) and Contemporary Sri Lankan Literature and Art: The Creation of a New Community in the Aftermath of War (2026).

Address

Ashoka University, Plot No. 2, Rajiv Gandhi Education City, Rai
Sonepat
131028

Website

http://csgs.ashoka.edu.in/

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