Close-up photo of Beenash Jafri smiling into the camera. She is wearing a collared shirt and has short dark curly hair.

Position Title
Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
Faculty Advisor

1213 Hart Hall
Office Hours
Fall 2023 office hours: By appointment
Bio

Beenash Jafri is an assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at UC Davis. Her work interrogates the fraught intersections of race, Indigeneity, settler colonialism, and sexuality through film and cultural criticism. Her forthcoming book, Settler Attachments and (De)Colonial Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press), examines Asian diasporic subjects’ stubborn attachments to settler colonialism, and the decolonial worlds they work towards. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in academic venues such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Settler Colonial Studies, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, and Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association; and in public venues such as Reappropriate, Public Books, Truthout, and Briarpatch Magazine. She is the book reviews co-editor for Lateral. 

Her broad areas of interest include critical race and ethnic studies; relational theory and critique; settler colonialism and decolonization; queer studies (esp queer of color critique); Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms; diasporic film and media; and representations of structural violence. She earned her PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies at York University (Toronto).