Sim Gill

Sim Gill's research brings affect theory into conversation with feminist standpoint theory and cultural analysis to develop new ways of understanding safety as an embodied, relational, and culturally mediated experience. 

Beginning with Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies, she advances an original theoretical framework that conceptualizes safety not as an individual feeling or objective condition, but as a socially organized affective force produced through cultural narratives, historical formations, and relations of power. Rather than simply applying existing theories to new empirical contexts, her work extends affect theory by demonstrating how experiences of fear, vulnerability, protection, and belonging circulate through bodies, institutions, and everyday practices, shaping lived experiences in ways that are both deeply personal and structurally constituted.

Her research is particularly attentive to how South Asian women negotiate intersecting expectations surrounding femininity, cultural belonging, and self-protection. She examines how racialized and gendered discourses position women simultaneously as vulnerable subjects in need of protection and as subjects whose experiences of violence are frequently minimized, rendered invisible, or culturally misrecognized. In doing so, she shows that affective experiences of safety and insecurity emerge not solely through interpersonal encounters but through broader historical, political, and cultural processes that regulate whose vulnerability is recognized, whose safety is prioritized, and whose experiences remain unintelligible.

More broadly, her work is situated within ongoing feminist debates concerning violence against women and girls, the social and subjective effects of these discourses, and the institutional politics that shape their production and circulation. She investigates the relationships between discourse, epistemology, affect, and subjectivity to illuminate how contemporary regimes of safety generate markets, moral imperatives, and normative expectations around women's self-governance. By bringing affect theory into dialogue with feminist standpoint theory and cultural analysis, she develops an interdisciplinary framework that rethinks safety, embodiment, cultural difference, and lived experience while also experimenting with multimodal forms of feminist knowledge production that expand how scholarship can be represented and communicated.