Academics are researching “Critical Aunty Studies” because the figure of the aunty can reveal how care, discipline, kinship, desire, style and political knowledge work beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family. Developed by US scholar and performer Kareem Khubchandani, the project treats “aunty” not as one fixed identity but as a useful lens for examining relationships and forms of learning that conventional accounts can overlook.
What is Critical Aunty Studies?
Critical Aunty Studies is an interdisciplinary project exploring the aunty as a cultural figure and a source of insight into kinship, care, aesthetics and power. Khubchandani organized a symposium around what he called the “ubiquitous but under-theorised” aunty. The work was later gathered in a 2022 special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly, introduced by Khubchandani as “Critical aunty studies: an auntroduction.” Read the scholarly introduction.
It is not presented as a formal discipline with one definition or method. Instead, the project brings different fields and cultural contexts into conversation. The special issue spans performance, literary, media and religion studies, with work engaging Caribbean, South and West African, Greek, Indian and Polish contexts. Its subjects include drag, pornography, TikToks, talk shows, poetry, teaching and the experience of surviving academia.
Why did Kareem Khubchandani develop the project?
In a 2021 interview, Khubchandani connected the idea to his writing about aunties for Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, his drag persona LaWhore and his interest in aunty fashion, including kaftans and conspicuous jewelry. He also recalled the close-knit Sindhi community in Ghana where he grew up. His mother’s friends came into the home, helped care for him and offered discipline and life lessons.
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Those experiences met a scholarly question: how could he think about aunties beyond familiar categories such as age, South Asianness and gender? He wanted to examine not just how aunties look or are represented, but also what they do, what they know and how their relationships shape people’s lives. Read Priyali Prakash’s interview with Khubchandani.
What can the figure of the aunty help scholars see?
Kinship beyond the nuclear family
An aunty may be a relative, but the term and the relationships around it can also point to forms of kinship that do not fit neatly within a nuclear-family model. Studying aunties therefore raises questions about which relationships are recognized in law and public discourse, and which are treated as peripheral. The project also asks how queer kinship and chosen family are understood when family is assumed to mean a mother, father and children.
Care, discipline and knowledge
Aunty-like care is not limited to affection. It can involve watching over family boundaries, correcting behavior, sharing advice and passing knowledge between generations. Khubchandani’s call for submissions, quoted in the Scroll interview, describes the aunty as “a liminal figure who might surveil the family’s boundaries or perhaps facilitate transgressions…” The tension matters: the same figure may enforce expectations or help someone cross them.
Knowledge and support can also circulate outside classrooms and formal institutions. The 2022 introduction considers “academic aunties” whose advice and care help people navigate institutional harm. This makes the aunty a way to think about who teaches, supports and sustains others, including when official structures do not.
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Performance, style and politics
Aunty style and performance are not merely decorative details in this framework. Fashion, gestures and media portrayals can signal belonging, age, authority, gender or resistance. Khubchandani’s own interests in drag and aunty fashion connect performance to questions of how identities are made visible and interpreted.
Does “aunty” mean the same thing everywhere?
No. Its meaning depends on community and context, and Khubchandani’s examples should not be mistaken for a universal account. He described the term in his Ghanaian Sindhi community as intimate and specific. He also discussed how diaspora media and Bollywood have sometimes cast older women as backward, out of place or blameworthy, while feminist social media practices challenge such stereotypes.
The scholarly project resists narrowing “aunty” to one identity or social role. It considers women, femme and queer figures, as well as aunt-like work and queer kinship. The useful contrast is not simply between a positive and negative stereotype: the figure can be caring and disciplinary, intimate and public, a relative and a performed or honorific identity.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What does the project say about academic legitimacy?
Critical Aunty Studies uses academic inquiry without claiming that the aunty needs approval from established institutions to matter. In his 2022 introduction, Khubchandani writes: “Critical Aunty Studies does not seek legitimacy as an academic field; aunty knows she is peripheral to hegemonic structures and does her best work at their edges.” The point is both methodological and political: forms of study, care and cultural knowledge can take place at the margins of institutions, not only within them.
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Khubchandani’s interview also explains why the subject unsettles conventional approaches to family and analysis. He says the aunty “requires us to take seriously inter-and intra-generational knowledge and culture-making, to scramble the study of chosen family and queer kinship that has implicitly construed family as already nuclear, and to untether (psycho)analysis from the figure of the mother.” This is his argument for widening the frame, not a claim that all family scholarship treats families identically.
Where does Critical Aunty Studies fit in existing scholarship?
The 2022 introduction situates the project alongside earlier work including Aunting: Cultural Practices that Sustain Family and Community Life and Where the Aunts Are: Family, Feminism, and Kinship in Popular Culture. These titles signal that scholarship on aunt-like practices and family relations predates the symposium. Critical Aunty Studies builds on that terrain while bringing performance, queer kinship, media and institutional life into its particular conversation.
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