"Reading this book has been one of the most refreshing and enchanting experiences precisely because of the generosity and care with which the author engages with her interlocutors. Their praxes are foregrounded because she makes sure that these accounts are not burdened by heavy theorisation." — Serawit B. Debele, Agenda
"Changing the Subject brilliantly unpacks the different governmentalities at work in contemporary neoliberal West Bengal and within the activist and NGO world. Srila Roy shows that it is precisely within the intimate and complex interaction between processes of governance and the self that the possibility of self-making within and against dominant norms takes place." — Catherine Rottenberg, Sociological Review
"There is no doubt that this is an important and topical book, filling a very real gap. It is provocative in its conceptualisation and therefore an extremely productive addition to multiple areas of inquiry, including neo-liberalism and social movements, queer movements, feminist fields, development studies among others. It invites one to engage with this version of the story to interrogate it and multiply the many other possible stories of this moment in the life of the feminist world-making project." — Sneha Gole, Economic and Political Weekly
"Examining our participant observation methods to include the digital presences of our subjects—contours already present in Roy's analysis—and responses to our transnational queer feminist pedagogy in various contexts are two of the many new directions opened by the incisive analyses offered in Changing the Subject." — Kanika Batra, Anthropology & Humanism
"Through her research and critique, she demonstrates powerfully a praxis against neoliberal, nationalist, and nativist logics. Srila Roy's book is a vibrant and richly ethnographic contribution to debates on political futures now." — Bridget Kenny, Anthropology & Humanism
"Roy’s groundbreaking work, Changing the Subject, emerges as a beacon. . . . Changing the Subject offers different ways to think of feminism’s co-optation in the context of global neoliberalism by thinking of feminism’s entanglement with the forms of power, encouraging a deeper understanding of its multifaceted impact on individual transformation and societal change. . . . Thorough, meticulous ethnographic analysis reveals how feminist and queer political organizations negotiate their roles within broader power dynamics, engaging with and transforming prevailing governmentalities." — Kiran Raveendran, Women's Studies
"The proficiency and ease with which [Roy] threads together the fluid entanglements within and between feminism, queerness, neoliberal governmentality and the self, is awe-inspiring; especially for a reader incapable of articulating such deep connections. In addition, theorizing such entanglements and recounting powerful feminist subaltern stories from the margins, has opened new pathways to imagine self-(re)making and feminism in a neoliberal age." — Amya Agarwal, Doing Sociology
“In this powerful, provocative, brilliant work of qualitative analysis and feminist theory, Srila Roy reveals queer and feminist activism of the last few decades in India as a story of the government of both society and of self, constituted by entanglements of historical and ongoing politics rather than one co-opted by the advent of neoliberal market reforms. Changing the Subject is essential reading for any understanding of how feminism and queer feminisms produce subjects and subjectivities.” — Inderpal Grewal, coeditor of Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism
“Through close ethnographic study of two feminist organizations in West Bengal, Srila Roy deftly demonstrates the promises and failures of the alignment between neoliberalism and feminism—in which each project relies on and is irreducible to the other. Offering fresh and counterintuitive arguments about feminist and queer politics in India, co-optation, and neoliberal governmentality in the Global South, Changing the Subject will be an integral part of the story of social justice movements everywhere capitalism and its antagonists meet.” — Naisargi N. Dave, author of Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics