Preity Kumar

Biography

Dr. Preity R. Kumar is (she/her) an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty member of Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island. Her research examines the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, colonialism, and violence in the Caribbean. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Guyana, her scholarship explores how LGBTQ communities navigate violence, belonging, and structural inequalities amid postcolonial transformations and rapid oil development. 

Her book, An Ordinary Landscape of Violence: Women Loving Women in Guyana (Rutgers University Press, 2024), is the first ethnography of LGBTQ women in Guyana. Based on multi-sited fieldwork with an intergenerational group of Afro-Guyanese, Indo-Guyanese, and Indigenous queer women, the book develops the concept of affective violence to theorize violence as an enduring social and affective condition rather than an exceptional event in queer women’s lives. The book contributes to queer and trans studies by demonstrating how sexuality, gender, race, class, and colonial histories shape the everyday experiences of violence and belonging within LGBTQ communities. Her book intervenes in feminist, Caribbean, and affect studies by showing how structural inequalities become lived, embodied, and felt.

Her current project Beyond the Barrel: Queer Survival and Climate Justice in Guyana’s Petro-State examines rapid extractive transformation reshapes everyday life in contemporary Guyana. As the country becomes a key site of global oil production, this project explores how expanding infrastructures of development—state policy, corporate investment, and transnational advocacy—intersect with oil change and development on the ground. The project focuses on how  LGBTQ+ communities navigate these changing landscapes through everyday practices of work, community, environmental changes, and mobility. It is particularly attentive to how uneven development produces new forms of precarity, visibility, and vulnerability, even as it generates narratives of national progress and inclusion.

Course
GWS 150: Gender and Women’s Studies
GWS 210G Queer and Transgender Studies,
GWS 350: Queerness in the Global South
GWS 400: Feminist Theories/Methodologies.

Research

  • Caribbean Feminist Thought
  • Queer /Trans Caribbean/LGBTQ Human Rights Movements
  • Colonial Violence and Intimate Partner Violence
  • Decoloniality/Decolonization

Education

Ph.D., York University, Toronto, 2018

M.A., York University, Toronto, 2012

Selected Publications

Select Articles
“We Deh”: Women-Loving Women, Rurality, and Creole Linguistic Potentials, Interalia: A Journal of Queer Studies, 2023. 

“Reclaiming Power: Women Loving Women and Intimate Partner Violence in Guyana.” Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 6-32, 2022

Kumar, Preity., and Krystal Ghisyawan.  “Queer Tactility: Same-sex and Interracial Intimacies in Chutney and Soca Music.” Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies 4 (2): 87–105, 2023

“The Cauxin-Femme Binary: Femme Performativity as a Response to Violence in Guyana.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 89-106. 2019

Book Chapters
“Tracing Colonial Violence in Women-Loving Women’s Relations: Towards a Decolonial Approach” in The Routledge Companion to Applied Qualitative Research in the Caribbean edited by Corin Bailey, Roy McCree, Latoya Lazarus, and Natalie Dietrich-Jones: 112-126. 2023

“Tales from the Field: Myths and Methodologies for Researching Same-Sex Desiring People in the Caribbean.” Co-authored with Nikoli Attai and Carla Moore. In Beyond Homophobia, edited by Moji Anderson and Erin MacLeod. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press. 2020. 

Public Writing
“Love in Ordinary Spaces: Queer Fieldnotes from Guyana.” (Invited blog essay). Caribbean Philosophical Association Blog 2025

Stabroek News. The Legacy of Violence in the Indo-Guyanese Diaspora: Remembering Riya Rajkumar. 2019