Sima Shakhsari is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. They earned their PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University and have held postdoctoral positions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center and the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Houston. Their book, titled Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke University Press, 2020), provides an analysis of Weblogistan as a site of cybergovernmentality where simultaneously national and neoliberal gendered subjectivities are produced through online and offline heteronormative disciplining and normalizing techniques, and where loaned life is subjected to a pending death in the name of rights. Shakhsari is the Anthropology, Sociology, and Gender Studies Book Review Editor at the International Journal of Middle East Studies, an editorial team member of Jadaliyya’s new sexuality page, and an editorial team member of Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges.
It may be hard to imagine that here, in the hot and humid Texas, being queer is “cool.” Believe it or not, Houston has a lesbian mayor ..
