Seeing the State with Transgender People: Gender, Caste, and Neoliberal Development in Kerala, India

This dissertation examines the entanglements of transgender identity and state power in contemporary Kerala, a southwestern state of India. It asks what trans-queer people can tell us about the changing shape of postcolonial developmentalist governance and the welfare state in the late-capitalist era. In the past decade, Indian LGBTQIA+ politics has seen a distinct, if ambivalent, shift towards reckoning with neoliberal governance, leaving the national LGBTQ+ movement in a state of stagnation or active co-optation by establishment politics. Through the case of Kerala, I argue that turning to India’s distinct subnational regions can reveal alternative genealogies of queer, anti-caste, and feminist politics in India that have been elided by nation-centric framings. In 2015, Kerala became the first Indian state to release a policy recognizing transgender people, reifying its transnational image as a “model” of people-centric Third World development. Since then, transgender Keralites have been fashioned as mascots of development within Kerala’s subnationalist political field by a range of players—political parties, social movements, and state- and state-allied agencies. Through 24 months of ethnographic field work across 2018-22, this dissertation follows trans-queer Keralites as they navigate the heightened contradictions of a particular historical moment: as newly recognized gendered subjects within a Left-led subnational state apparatus, in a country with a Hindu Right-wing party at the helm, within a late neoliberal juncture where welfare is being shaped as a site for expanded governance and the purchase of political legitimacy rather than redistribution. The dissertation presents the framing of “anti-caste materialist feminism” to think along with queer-trans Keralites at this juncture. Rather than relying on presumed solidarity based on identity, such a materialist vision is built by people whose lives are variously curtailed by capitalism/power collectively theorizing about their lives. While the state and civil society tend to insulate transgender subjects through recognition, the dissertation shows that trans-queer people’s politics and lives are built fundamentally on historical-material relationships—between transgender people, same-sex loving people, sex workers, impoverished cis women, oppressor-caste cis women, and Dalit-Bahujan (oppressed-caste and religious) communities.

Author dc:creator

• Shilpa Menon (24400145)

• anthropology of the state
• gender and sexuality studies
• India studies

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-05-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.32995202.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32995202