When headlines announced that a South Asian drag queen had been invited to teach at Harvard, the story ricocheted across social media under familiar culture-war keywords: drag, academia, elite universities, identity politics. But behind the clickbait was a far more layered, intellectually grounded story—one that connects performance, scholarship, migration, and queer South Asian histories. The person at the center of the storm is Kareem Khubchandani, an Indian academic, writer, and performer whose drag persona, LaWhore Vagistan, has long been part of their serious scholarly work rather than a gimmick.
Khubchandani is an associate professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University, where teaching and research sit at the intersection of queer studies, performance theory, race, and diaspora. Trained in performance studies, with a doctorate from Northwestern University, Khubchandani has spent years examining how everyday gestures, nightlife, humor, fashion, and bodily expression become forms of political knowledge—especially for queer communities navigating postcolonial and diasporic worlds. Drag, in this framework, is not entertainment alone but a method: a way of thinking through power, desire, shame, and survival.
The drag name LaWhore Vagistan is deliberately provocative and deeply personal. “LaWhore” riffs on Lahore, the city tied to family histories of Partition and displacement between India and Pakistan, while “Vagistan” satirically reclaims a feminized geography that has long been policed, mocked, or erased. On stage, LaWhore Vagistan appears as a desi aunty figure—sharp-tongued, glamorous, unapologetically queer—channeling South Asian auntie culture, Bollywood excess, and diasporic irony. The character exposes how nationalism, patriarchy, and respectability politics operate on brown bodies, while also offering audiences humor, recognition, and release.
This blend of scholarship and performance is what drew Harvard University to invite Khubchandani as a visiting instructor. In recent academic years, Khubchandani taught courses such as “Queer Ethnography” and “RuPaulitics: Drag, Race, and Desire,” classes that examine drag not as spectacle but as a cultural archive and political practice.
The Harvard announcement, amplified by partisan media and social platforms, quickly became fodder for outrage cycles. Clips and screenshots circulated divorced from context, while commentators framed the appointment as evidence of either radical decay or radical progress. What often went missing from the noise was Khubchandani’s substantial body of work. For example, the book Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife documents queer social worlds in India with ethnographic rigor and cultural sensitivity, tracing how style, language, and pleasure create community in spaces often rendered invisible or unsafe. Khubchandani’s writing situates South Asian queer life within global conversations on sexuality while resisting Western templates that flatten local realities. In classrooms, drag becomes one pedagogical tool among many—alongside theory, history, and fieldwork—used to make abstract ideas about embodiment and power legible.
The backlash itself, however, became part of the story Khubchandani has long been telling. The intense reactions revealed how drag continues to unsettle institutions precisely because it collapses boundaries: between high theory and popular culture, between the “serious” scholar and the playful performer, between private desire and public debate. For South Asian queer communities in particular, LaWhore Vagistan represents something rare—a figure who refuses to choose between intellectual credibility and flamboyant self-expression, between diaspora respectability and unruly humor.
In that sense, the Harvard controversy has been less an anomaly than a mirror. It reflected anxieties about who gets to produce knowledge, what counts as expertise, and whose bodies are allowed to teach. Khubchandani’s career suggests that drag, far from diluting academic rigor, can sharpen it—forcing institutions and audiences alike to confront the assumptions they carry about gender, race, and authority. For those willing to look past the outrage headlines, this story is not about provocation for its own sake, but about expanding the ways we understand culture, pedagogy, and the many performances that shape everyday life.
Spicy Auntie is smiling. No, actually, Spicy Auntie is grinning so hard her chili-pepper necklace is practically vibrating. A desi drag queen teaching at Harvard? Darling, that’s not the end of civilization — that’s the syllabus finally catching up with reality.
Let’s be honest. Academia has always loved performance. Men in robes, Latin mottos, rituals older than common sense — but the moment someone adds eyeliner, a wig, and an accent that smells like diaspora trauma and sexual freedom, suddenly people clutch their pearls. Please. If knowledge had a dress code, half of what we know about power, empire, and desire would never have made it into a footnote.
What delights me most is not the outrage (predictable, boring, recycled), but the elegance of the move. Drag has always been pedagogy. Aunties know this. We teach through gossip, exaggeration, shame, humor, and love. We perform norms so loudly that their cracks become visible. We make the private public and then dare you to look away. Drag does the same thing — only with better lighting.
And let’s talk about desi drag for a moment. Not RuPaul runway fantasy alone, but auntie drag, diaspora drag, post-Partition drag. The kind that carries Lahore and Delhi, Karachi and Mumbai, shame and survival, in one overstuffed handbag. The kind that understands that gender, like borders, was violently drawn and constantly policed — and therefore can be joyfully crossed.
Am I amused? Yes. Because the same people who say “keep politics out of education” are the ones who panic when students learn that bodies, pleasure, race, and power are political whether you talk about them or not. Am I pleased? Very. Because queer South Asians are so often told to choose: tradition or freedom, intellect or flamboyance, respectability or joy. This says: no, you can have all of it, and you can teach it too.
Am I proud? Oh, immensely. Not because Harvard is a prize — institutions are slow, cautious beasts — but because seeing drag treated as knowledge rather than noise matters. It matters to young queer kids in brown families who think they have to shrink to survive. It matters to students who finally see that theory can wear lipstick. It matters to all of us who learned more about the world from kitchens, dance floors, and aunties than from textbooks.
And thrilled? Darling, I am thrilled because this is how change actually happens. Not with polite silence, but with laughter, discomfort, brilliance, and a little bit of scandal. Long live drag. Long live aunties. And welcome to class, my loves — attendance is mandatory, but fabulousness is optional (though strongly encouraged).