Position Title
Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
Faculty Advisor
Beenash Jafri is an assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at UC Davis. Her work engages longstanding debates on relationality and coalition across feminist and queer, Indigenous and critical ethnic studies. Most recently, its focus has been directed towards investigating Asian diasporic relationships to settler colonialism and Indigeneity through film and media. Her book, Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) is an interdisciplinary study of how and why Asian diasporas remain stubbornly attached to settler colonial ideals despite experiences of colonization, racism, and displacement. The book examines the problems and perils of Asian-Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, while also calling for film studies scholars to approach their objects differently: to prioritize the relational examination of race and Indigeneity. She is the co-editor of Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, 2025), and of Amerasia's forthcoming special issue on Asian Settler Colonial Critique.
Her writing has been published in academic venues such as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Feminist 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, ASAP/J, Truthout, and Briarpatch Magazine. She is the book reviews co-editor for Lateral.
- PhD, Gender, Feminist & Women's Studies, York University
- MA, Sociology & Equity Studies in Education, University of Toronto
- BES, Environmental Studies, York University
- critical ethnic studies; Indigenous studies; settler colonialism; queer studies; Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms; Asian American studies; film and cultural criticism
- Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2025)
- Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (Temple University Press, 2025. Volume co-edited with Robert Carley, Anne Donlon, Laura J. Kwak, Eero Lane, SAJ, and Chris Alen Sula)
- "Suicide-in-Relation: Sexuality and Space in The Joy of Life and Mississippi Damned." Feminist Studies 50.2 (2024): 183-207.
- Dead Ringers and the Horrors of White Feminism ASAP/J. 8 October, 2024.
- Our Matrix of Desire Public Books. 31 January, 2024.
- Settler Colonialism Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies II. Eds Ann Braithwaite and Catherine Orr. New York: Routledge, 2024. 201-210.
- Native Survivance and the Violent Pleasures of Resignifying the Cowboy. (exhibit review of Cowboy, Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, Sept 2023-Feb 2024). American Quarterly 76.2 (2024): 311-322.
- Asian American Cowboys and Native Erasure Reappropriate: Asian American Feminism, Politics, and Pop Culture. 30 September, 2022.
- Reframing Suicide: Queer Diasporic and Indigenous Imaginaries. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 27.4 (2021): 577-602.
- Refusal/Film: Diasporic-Indigenous Relationalities. Settler Colonial Studies 10.1 (2020): 115-125.
- Ongoing Colonial Violence in Settler States Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 6.2 (2017)
- Desire, Settler Colonialism and the Racialized Cowboy. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37(2): 73-86.
- Privilege vs. Complicity: People of Colour and Settler Colonialism FedCan Equity Matters Blog. Ed. Malinda Smith. Ottawa: Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 21st March, 2012.