Why you shouldn’t reject aunty ji just yet

I am the aunty around hererdquo USbased academic author and drag artiste Kareem Khubchandani tells us selfassuredly over a call referring to his drag character LaWhore Vagistan who dresses up in blingy sarees heavy jewellery and loud makeup ldquoI am one of the older folks in the global South Asian drag scene who is still performing I have watched the drag scene change So I think my age and memory also allow me to hold a more capacious view of what our drag looked like In that sense I am the aunty and I happy to be herrdquo he admitsHardly embarrassed or even reluctant about giving himself a ldquotitlerdquo that has come to embody negative connotations Khubchandani a Mellon Bridge assistant professor in theatre dance and performance studies and womenrsquos gender and sexuality studies at Tufts University Massachusetts is hoping people acknowledge the ldquoaunty figurerdquo in our day to day livesKhubchandani says his drag avatar LaWhore Vagistan who dresses up in blingy sarees is an ldquoauntyrdquo Pic courtesyWiliam BoydHis new academic endeavour is a website Critical Aunty Studies featuring a series of presentations by artistes scholars and activists exploring the ldquoundertheorised auntiesrdquo ldquoI have been writing about aunties in my own research but as a responsible scholar I have always been trying to cite other peoplersquos work on this and to draw from different disciplines to see how they think about these aunty figures As I did this I realised that the actual word aunty as reflected in different cultures isnrsquot deeply theorised So while people may talk about extended families and their importance the aunty figure despite so much cultural production around her is very rarely actually thought about and given importance I think that absence of thinking reflects the way we deal with aunties They are everywhere but they are not the important onesrdquo he says of why he felt the need to bring scholarly attention to auntiesAunty as Khubchandani explains in a Tedx Talk How To Be An Auntie refers to elders in our community women of our parentsrsquo age ldquoThey are not part of the nuclear family but they feel very present in the home She belongs there even if she is not related and she shows up there even when she is not invitedrdquoSima Taparia the face of the Netflix docureality series Indian Matchmaking chose to position herself as ldquoSima from Mumbairdquo ldquoBut we chose to position her as an auntyrdquo says KhubchandaniKhubchandani who grew up in a Sindhi community in Ghana says being surrounded by his motherrsquos friends has ldquoeverything to do with my understanding of the auntyrdquo ldquoMy mum would pick me up from school and instead of going home wersquod go to my auntyrsquos house There they would sit and chat and make sure I am fed I would listen to so many of their conversations as a sort of fly on the wall I remember my aunties rehearsing for Diwali shows in the living room and I used to copy their choreography They had so much fun together I loved it And I wished that for myself toordquo he recallsWhat really struck him was the amount of emotional and material work they had done for each other ldquoAnd that happens when men are not at home in the day timemdashitrsquos a different kind of work thatrsquos really underacknowledged It happens in collectivity it is not just one person Itrsquos not one aunty but there are many aunties who are sort of working together conspiring to make each otherrsquos lives betterrdquoAunties says Khubchandani often do the things that our parents never would adding that they are loud and domineering and gossipy too But most importantly he says that they are a cipher for younger ldquogenerations to critique older peoplersquos outdated politics and style This is why nobody wants to be an auntyrdquoOn the Critical Aunty Studies website for instance Bimbola Akinbola a practising visual artist and assistant professor in the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University speaks about how on the video sharing app Tik Tok the ldquoAfrican auntiesrdquo hashtag has over six million views Her multimedia presentation examines how African women and girls embody and perform the African aunty on Tik Tok focusing on three types of videosmdashthe deprecating aunty performances celebratory aunty performances and restaged encounters with aunties This is not very far removed from whatrsquos being seen in social media closer home where the ldquojudgmental auntyrdquo who is constantly nagging you about marriage children and life in general is a recurring and popular trope squeezed dry by Indian content creatorsldquoYes there is a lot of Tik Tok and Instagram content where they aunties are an object of critiquerdquo admits Khubchandani ldquoWhat I feel is that people are protecting themselves from critiquing their own parents If your parents are forcing you into heteronormative behaviour or if they are fatshaming you commenting on your skin colour making content critiquing that can be really risky I think aunties are that foil to critique a generation that is close to you But then it raises the question for memdashwhy are they the whipping horse of the younger generation and what are we losing when we constantly do thatrdquo he asksLast year Mumbaibased matchmaker Sima Taparia who became the face of the controversial Netflix docureality series Indian Matchmaking earned the moniker of ldquoSima auntyrdquo for a similar reason he feels ldquoSo with Sima aunty there are things that she is seeing which are a problem based on the parameters she is using She is not the most likeable figure and it is definitely difficult to be around someone who is blunt At the core of it what we need to ask is how she became Seema aunty She calls herself Sima from Mumbai and that is the way she is positioning herself But we chose to position her as an aunty In doing so we are creating a distance between her and ourselves I am less interested in her than the way we frame her and the way we choose to think with that termrdquoOne of the disadvantages of this stereotyping is that it invisibilises ldquothe feminist queer and transgender auntiesrdquo ldquoIf we constantly produce these older figures as stuck in heteronormativity we are ignoring the generation of activists who have worked very hard to survive A different trope altogether is the divorced aunties who have said f off to patriarchy and said Irsquod rather live on my own terms How do we celebrate them in our lives How do we acknowledge those aunties who have chosen to live differently and treat people differentlyrdquoWith Critical Aunty Studies Khubchandani says he is attempting to examine why we should ldquonot reject the aunty altogetherrdquo ldquoBy rejecting her we also reject the tools and aesthetics she gives us If we keep saying thatrsquos not us and thatrsquos not what our generation stands for itrsquos throwing the baby out withthe bathwaterrdquoShare your thoughtsThe aunty will be the focus of a special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly that Khubchandani will be editing ldquoWe are looking for scholarly submissions that think through the idea of the aunty and as a way of thinking as well as those who are doing visual and performance work related to this figure Itrsquos aunty as you conceptualise itrdquo he says You can send in your submissions before August 1For queries write to kareemkhubchandanituftsedu