School of Social and Political Science

Description

This seminar draws on themes developed in my new book, Beyond Transgender: The Social and Political Lives of Gender Nonconforming People in India, which examines the politics of identity and belonging among gender nonconforming (GNC) people against the backdrop of NGO proliferation and transgender rights reforms. While existing scholarship has shown how GNC identities become legible within NGO settings through demands for respectability, international intelligibility, and state recognition, less attention has been paid to how these demands shape understandings of self and others beyond institutional settings. Drawing on thirty-seven in-depth interviews and informed by a social constructionist framework, I examine how participants balance local moral repertoires, embodied practices, and social expectations with institutional norms. The book advances three primary arguments. First, it contends that GNC identities are provisional, goal-directed, and strategically negotiated. Second, it argues that there is no singular “community” but rather multiple overlapping communities with porous boundaries through which participants structure their social lives. ​​Third, it argues that recent transgender rights legislation in India marks a "negative moment": a dangerous convergence of biopolitical governance, homonormativity, and homonationalism that expands legal recognition while narrowing the possibilities for emancipatory politics. These arguments open up the possibility of imagining justice beyond recognition, centring situated voices, and building intersectional solidarities.