Ananya Dasgupta

Ananya Dasgupta is a student of literature, film, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. She studied English Literature at Jadavpur University before working on her doctoral thesis at IIT Bombay and Monash University. Her PhD thesis grappled with figures of extra-legality in Hindi cinema that utter a complaint against sexual violence and the inadequacy or unwillingness of the law to address it. This thesis reads the framing of sexual violence as a pervasive threat that interacts with anxieties borne out of such peculiar responses to neoliberalism in India as ascriptive values of caste-Hindu merit, aspirational ideals of mobility, revised ideas of youth and femininity, the abstraction of sexuality as part of a private personhood, and unequal claims to safe public space. She enjoys train rides, all things horror, and daydreaming about Dungeons and Dragons campaigns.