Kareem Khubchandani

Kareem Khubchandani is a researcher, performance artist, and organizer. Khubchandani's research, teaching, and performance exists at the intersections between queer nightlife, global politics, ethnography, South Asian diaspora, and drag. Khubchandani performs in drag as LaWhore Vagistan, who interweaves storytelling, standup comedy, body art, theater, and digital media.

Education and work

Khubchandani holds a BA in sociology and anthropology from Colgate University, an MA and PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University, and was the inaugural Embrey Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

As an author, Khubchandani has been published in Scholar and Feminist Online, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, The Velvet Light Trap, Theater Topics, Theatre Journal, and The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Upcoming essays will be featured in Other Pop Empires, The Global Encyclopedia of LGBTQ History, and Oxford Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Khubchandani serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Department of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University. often combining performance with lecturing about queer nightlife, gender discipline, and South Asian diasporic culture. He started drag in Chicago, Illinois in 2009.

With Khubchandani's teaching, Vagistan is often featured as a guest-lecturer, allowing for an alternative, performing pedagogy, as presented by a South Asian drag queen. In one of Vagistan's performances, Lessons in Drag, she raises issues of gender discipline and explores South Asian popular culture through anecdotes, monologues, research interviews, stand-up comedy, and dance. Vagistan has performed at Austin International Drag Festival, Mustard Seed South Asian Film Festival, The Asia Society, AS220, Queens Museum, Jack Theater, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Not Festival, and A.R.T. Oberon.

Apart from his performances, Khubchandani's videos have been screened at the Mississauga South Asian Film Festival, Austin OUTsider Multi-Arts festival, Hyderabad Queer Film Festival, and the San Francisco 3rd i film festival.