Dr Abeera Khan

Dr. Abeera Khan is a scholar of transnational feminist and queer of color critique. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on empire's mobilisations of gender and sexuality and the queer, feminist movements that emerge in confrontation and response.  

Her work on the gender and sexual politics of empire, liberalism and fascism has appeared in several peer-reviewed, independent, and public outlets listed below. She is co-editor of the Wasafiri Magazine’s special issue “Abolitions: Writing Against Abandonment.” She is an associate editor of The Hythe Review, a literary journal of critical prose and poetics published by the independent publishing collective, The87Press. 

Dr. Khan is passionate about public pedagogy and community engagement. She has delivered talks, and workshops for several organising groups and cultural institutions in and around London such as The Decolonial Centre, Ibraaz, ICA London, the Bishopsgate Institute, and QUEERCIRCLE. She is always keen to engage with reading groups, activist organisations, cultural venues, galleries and cultural institutions in the UK and beyond.  

She received her Ph.D. in Gender Studies from SOAS. Prior to joining the Department of Gender Studies, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Gender and Culture at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  

Dr. Khan’s research yokes together queer of color critique and postcolonial feminism with political theories of liberalism, racial capitalism, and orientalism. Currently, she is working on two projects.  

The first is the finalisation of her book manuscript, titled Genealogies of Deviance: Race, Sexuality and the Making of the Queer Muslim. Departing from popular focus on the queer Muslim’s marginality, this book traces how the modern workings of capital and empire mediate the queer Muslim’s disparate figuration in contemporary Britain. Despite the agential capacity of queer Muslims themselves, Genealogies of Deviance argues that their newfound legibility is conditional on the reproduction of longstanding notions of Muslims’ racial and sexual deviance. Drawing from a rich cultural archive of Muslim figuration in moral panics, securitisation policies, and exclusionary nationalisms, this book analyses the risks of queer Muslim visibility in a social imaginary fixated on Muslim illiberalism. At the same time, it turns to abolitionist, antifascist struggles and diasporic cultural production to reimagine the radical politics that can emerge at the unlikely and opaque intersections of ‘queer’ and ‘Muslim.’  

The second, more nascent project, tentatively titled ‘After Homonationalism,’ considers the gender and sexual politics of the current fascist conjuncture. It investigates the limits of understanding the contemporary moment as a ‘rollback’ of gender and sexual rights or a failure of identity politics. Instead, this project analyses how liberalism prefigures fascism by tracing how the queer liberalisms of the 2000s and 2010s have set the stage for the current ‘frontlash’ against renewed gendered, sexualised, and racialised constructions of surplus populations. Dr. Khan has published an essay stemming from this project, titled ‘After Homonationalism,’ as part of the first title in the Wirklichkeit Books Pamphlet Series. Relatedly, she co-organised a study day on ‘Feminism and the Fascist Conjuncture’ in September 2026, funded by the Sociological Review Foundation’s ‘Undisciplining’ Seminar Series.  

Dr. Khan is available for doctoral supervision of projects that relate to the above outlined research interests, in addition to those that bring feminist, queer and trans approaches to diaspora studies, cultural studies, and political theory.