Alok Vaid-Menon

Alok Vaid-Menon performs, speaks and designs clothes under the single name ALOK, and has taken that work to more than forty countries. Born in College Station, Texas, in 1991 to a Malayali father and a Punjabi mother, they read feminist, gender and sexuality studies alongside comparative studies in race and ethnicity at Stanford, adding a master's in sociology in 2013. From 2013 to 2017 they toured as half of the performance duo DarkMatter with Janani Balasubramanian. Beyond the Gender Binary, issued by Penguin Workshop in 2020 with drawings by Ashley Lukashevsky, runs to 64 pages in the Pocket Change Collective series and argues that gender works better as creative expression than as a choice between two boxes. A poetry collection, Femme in Public, appeared in 2017.