Biography

Prerna Subramanian is a feminist urban humanities scholar whose work examines how cinematic and digital infrastructures organise intimacy, mobility, and mental health in contemporary South Asia and its diasporas. Drawing on film and media studies, human geography, and critical disability and mad studies, she analyzes how screens—from OTT platforms and reality TV to fandom ecologies and social media—shape who is allowed to move, belong, and be recognised as fully human.

Her research is especially attentive to processes of racialisation and minoritisation, and to how they intersect with gender, sexuality, religion, and caste in Indian and transnational contexts. Across projects on transgender representation in post-millennial streaming media, lesbian and trans cinema, mental health in academia, platformed intimacies in shows like Indian Matchmaking, and digital witnessing of Palestine, she treats scenes of popular culture as windows into wider infrastructures of care, control, and survival.

Prerna’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Sociology Compass, Media Asia, South Asian Review, Society and Culture in South Asia, Agenda, and in edited collections on mobility, gender, and media. She is currently developing her first monograph, Trans Intimacies and Cinematic Cities (under review with Manchester University Press), which traces how urban visual cultures in India and its diasporas fashion certain lives as desirable, governable, or disposable. Alongside her research, she teaches at Jindal Global Law School, where she offers interdisciplinary courses on mobility justice, feminist media and urban studies, and writing.