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. It is the first book to think about the problems and perils of Asian-Indigenous relationality through film and visual media. Conversely, it also calls 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 (under contract with Temple University Press), 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, 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, Truthout, and Briarpatch Magazine. She is the book reviews co-editor for Lateral.

 

Her broad areas of interest include critical race and ethnic studies; relational theory and critique; settler colonialism and decolonization; queer studies (esp queer of color critique); Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms; diasporic film and media; and representations of structural violence. She earned her PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women's Studies at York University (Toronto).