Outrage after Harvard hires drag queen named ‘LaWhore Vagistan’ as visiting professor

Harvard University just hired a drag performer as its new professor. The Ivy League School confirmed that Kareem Khubchandani is expected to teach a class on the TV show ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ in the spring semester, a statement that was announced over the summer.

The institution welcomed Kareem in a message rolled out in July to the college community and shared how this visiting professor from Tufts University will be teaching in the Studies of Gender and Sexuality program, all thanks to the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus.

Khubchandani is better known by her name LaWhore Vagistani, who is a persona that the academic has made an integral part of their pedagogy. The professor will often lecture in the guise of LaWhore, which has been a personal project for more than a decade, even spawning a music video dubbed ‘Sari!’

In an interview with his own drag persona published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015, Khubchandani spilled the tea on the origin of the off-putting stage name.

‘My name is LaWhore Vagistan’ and my preferred pronouns are she or aunty. ‘LaWhore was chosen to the family traces which originate in Pakistan’- they continued. She will teach just two classes over the course of two semesters, Queer Ethnography and RuPaulitics.