Sima Shakhsari is an assistant professor of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. They are interested in transnational feminist theory, transnational sexuality studies, non-Eurocentric queer and transgender studies, Middle East studies, empire, militarism, neoliberal governmentality, digital media, refugee studies, diasporas, and political anthropology. Shakhsari 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. Shakhsari was an assistant professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at Wellesley College before joining GWSS at UMN in 2016, and has a long history of activism at queer and women’s organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their forthcoming book manuscript titled “Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan” (under contract with Duke University Press) 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. Shakhsari’s current research examines the way that Iranian transgender asylum seekers in Turkey and refugees in Canada and the U.S. are nationalized/denationalized, sexed, gendered, and raced in multiple re-reterritorializations as they transition across national boundaries, online and offline “frontiers,” sexual norms, religious discourses, and geopolitical terrains during the “war on terror.”

Anthropology

Democratization

Diaspora/Refugee Studies

Ethnography

Gender/Women's Studies

Middle East/Near East Studies

Queer/LGBT Studies

Transnationalism

Iran

Turkey

Other

Queer And Transgender Studies; Refugee Studies; In

Persian (advanced)

Azeri (intermediate)