Why you shouldn’t reject aunty ji just yet

She is gossipy, judgmental and perhaps, too critical for your liking, but professor and drag artiste Kareem Khubchandani, is leading an academic project on the ubiquitous aunty to say there’s a lot of good she brings to the table

I am the aunty around here,” US-based academic, author and drag artiste Kareem Khubchandani tells us self-assuredly over a call, referring to his drag character LaWhore Vagistan, who dresses up in blingy sarees, heavy jewellery and loud makeup. “I 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 her,” he admits.

Hardly embarrassed or even reluctant about giving himself a “title” that has come to embody negative connotations, Khubchandani, a Mellon Bridge assistant professor in theatre, dance, and performance studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts, is hoping people acknowledge the “aunty figure” in our day to day lives. 

Khubchandani says his drag avatar LaWhore Vagistan, who dresses up in blingy sarees, is an “aunty”. Pic courtesy/Wiliam Boyd

His new academic endeavour is a website, Critical Aunty Studies, featuring a series of presentations by artistes, scholars, and activists exploring the “under-theorised aunties”. “I have been writing about aunties in my own research, but as a responsible scholar I have always been trying to cite other people’s 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, isn’t 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 ones,” he says of why he felt the need to bring scholarly attention to aunties.

Aunty, as Khubchandani explains in a Tedx Talk, How To Be An Auntie, refers to elders in our community, women of our parents’ age. “They 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 invited.”

Sima Taparia, the face of the Netflix docu-reality series, Indian Matchmaking, chose to position herself as “Sima from Mumbai”. “But we chose to position her as an aunty,”  says Khubchandani

Khubchandani, who grew up in a Sindhi community in Ghana, says being surrounded by his mother’s friends, has “everything to do with my understanding of the aunty”. “My mum would pick me up from school and instead of going home, we’d go to my aunty’s 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 too,” he recalls.

What really struck him was the amount of emotional and material work they had done for each other. “And that happens when men are not at home, in the day time—it’s a different kind of work that’s really under-acknowledged. It happens in collectivity, it is not just one person. It’s not one aunty, but there are many aunties, who are sort of working together, conspiring, to make each other’s lives  better.”

Aunties, 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 “generations to critique older people’s outdated politics and style. This is why nobody wants to be an aunty.”

On 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 “African aunties” 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 videos—the deprecating aunty performances, celebratory aunty performances, and re-staged encounters with aunties. This is not very far removed from what’s being seen in social media closer home, where the “judgmental aunty” who is constantly nagging you about marriage, children, and life in general, is a recurring and popular trope, squeezed dry by Indian content creators. 

“Yes, there is a lot of Tik Tok and Instagram content, where they [aunties] are an object of critique,” admits Khubchandani. “What 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 fat-shaming 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 me—why are they the whipping horse of the younger generation and what are we losing when we constantly do that?” he asks.

Last year, Mumbai-based matchmaker Sima Taparia, who became the face of the controversial Netflix docu-reality series, Indian Matchmaking, earned the moniker of “Sima aunty,” for a similar reason, he feels. “So, 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 term.”

One of the disadvantages of this stereotyping is that it invisibilises “the feminist, queer and transgender aunties”. “If 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 I’d 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 differently?”

With Critical Aunty Studies, Khubchandani says, he is attempting to examine why we should “not reject the aunty altogether”. “By rejecting her, we also reject the tools and aesthetics she gives us. If we keep saying, that’s not us, and that’s not what our generation stands for, it’s throwing the baby out with 
the bathwater.”

Share your thoughts

The aunty will be the focus of a special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly that Khubchandani will be editing. “We 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. It’s aunty as you conceptualise it,” he says. You can send in your submissions before August 1. 

For queries, write to: kareem.khubchandani@tufts.edu

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