Sociological and Cultural Studies Seminar Series
Date: Wednesday 15 October 2025
Time: 15:30 - 17:00
Venue: Room 432, St Andrews Building, 11 Eldon Street, Glasgow
Category: Academic events
Speaker: Professor Amy Lind and Prateek Srivastava (University of Cincinatti)

Amy Lind, Transfeminist Queer/Cuir Worldmaking and Decolonial Justice in Ecuador

In the mid-1990s, Coccinelle, a trans, travesti and transfeminine sex workers organization, played a central role in the campaign leading to the 1997 decriminalization of homosexuality in Ecuador. Nonetheless, in reading accounts of this victory and of trans participation in seeking justice in Ecuador, their lives and political roles remain largely invisible. In this talk, I aim to broaden, nuance, and deepen the historical scholarship of LGBTI rights and transitional justice by highlighting the strategies of justice utilized by Coccinelle. By taking a transfeminist approach, I highlight the work of Coccinelle as a praxis informed by trans knowledges and worldmaking strategies that respond to the immediate material needs of trans and gender nonbinary people (Garriga-López & Martínez 2023), as they navigate the carceral state and in the absence of institutional support of most any kind. In so doing, I argue for a reframing of research on transitional justice and repair in contexts of violence.

Amy Lind is Professor of Politics in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati. She has conducted research and published in the areas of global political economy, critical development and postcolonial/decolonial studies, Latin American politics, and gender and sexuality/queer studies. She is the author of Gendered Paradoxes: Women's Movements, State Restructuring and Global Development in Ecuador, editor of Development, Sexual Rights and Global Governance, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Her current research focuses on queer and trans responses to state violence in neoliberal Ecuador and Chile. 

 

Prateek Srivastava, Reimagining Reform: Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Post-War Sri Lanka

What does justice mean when queer and trans lives remain invisible, illegal, and illegitimate? In post-war Sri Lanka, queer and trans communities develop alternative visions of justice and reform that reflect their experiences of the three-decade-long bloody civil war. For queer and trans communities, the violence of war did not end in 2009; it lingers in peace itself through laws, policies, and transitional justice processes that deny their existence. Yet, from the ruins of war, sexuality and gender shape experiences of violence, peace, and survival, while also revealing how “reform” often disciplines bodies into acceptable forms of citizenship. This discussion shows how queer and trans experiences create space for imagining justice differently: as relational, incomplete, and disruptive of the very norms that claim to heal. 

Prateek Srivastava is a doctoral candidate in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati. His research explores the intersections of feminist and queer experiences with post-war development, militarization, and the political economy of resistance in Sri Lanka. He holds degrees in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from UC and in Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies from KU Leuven. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Sri Lanka, his current work examines the entanglements of economic crisis, protest, and queer politics in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s 2022 uprising.