{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132787"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132787","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Queer life and moral policing in the time of Hindutva","abstract":"In this dissertation project, I analyze what I consider to be three artifacts constitutive of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) mission to make India a “Hindu” state. I suggest that The Transgender Persons (Protections of Rights) Act 2019, moral policing and the assassination of a journalist all (re)create and help extend Hindu nationalism. While the killing of Lankesh was explicitly violent, I suggest that the Transgender Act and moral policing inflict violence in implicit ways upon queer and transgender people in their everyday lives. In Article 1, I use ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze the Trans Act and the ways it conceptualizes gender. I then bring in the experiences of my participants to show how this Act disregards the lived experiences of trans people and instead is a state tool to collect demographic data about its citizens. In Article 2, I present moral policing as a form of informal social control used by non-state actors to enforce and uphold the Hindutva nationalism and gender ideology. Non-state actors such as aunties, shopkeepers and security guards advance the same ideology as state-actors and help formulate and circulate the Hindutva discourses. I foreground the experiences of my participants to show the everyday impacts of such state-sanctioned gender ideology and moral policing. I unpack how power operates in moral policing and how hegemonic ways of policing queer people are reproduced in queer spaces as well. In Article 3, I examine representations of nation and gender in newspaper coverage of the assassination a woman journalist named Gauri Lankesh. I wonder how a vernacular press journalist like Lankesh could become a martyr for English-speaking intellectual liberals and the English-language media. While both media present different narratives of the murder and its aftermath, they both downplay its gendered implications.","abstract_html":"In this dissertation project, I analyze what I consider to be three artifacts constitutive of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) mission to make India a “Hindu” state. I suggest that The Transgender Persons (Protections of Rights) Act 2019, moral policing and the assassination of a journalist all (re)create and help extend Hindu nationalism. While the killing of Lankesh was explicitly violent, I suggest that the Transgender Act and moral policing inflict violence in implicit ways upon queer and transgender people in their everyday lives. In Article 1, I use ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze the Trans Act and the ways it conceptualizes gender. I then bring in the experiences of my participants to show how this Act disregards the lived experiences of trans people and instead is a state tool to collect demographic data about its citizens. In Article 2, I present moral policing as a form of informal social control used by non-state actors to enforce and uphold the Hindutva nationalism and gender ideology. Non-state actors such as aunties, shopkeepers and security guards advance the same ideology as state-actors and help formulate and circulate the Hindutva discourses. I foreground the experiences of my participants to show the everyday impacts of such state-sanctioned gender ideology and moral policing. I unpack how power operates in moral policing and how hegemonic ways of policing queer people are reproduced in queer spaces as well. In Article 3, I examine representations of nation and gender in newspaper coverage of the assassination a woman journalist named Gauri Lankesh. I wonder how a vernacular press journalist like Lankesh could become a martyr for English-speaking intellectual liberals and the English-language media. While both media present different narratives of the murder and its aftermath, they both downplay its gendered implications.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Delanthamajalu, Shwetha"],"institution":"University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"Ph.D.","degree_level":"Dissertation","degree_discipline":"Sociology","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Marshall, Anna-Maria","Dill, Brian","Atiles, Jose","Vogler, Stefan"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2025,"date_issued":"2025-12","date_published":"2025-12","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:25:07Z","subjects":["India","moral policing","queer","Hindutva","gender"],"languages":["en"],"rights":["Copyright Shwetha Delanthamajalu 2025"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132787","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Marshall, Anna-Maria","Dill, Brian","Atiles, Jose","Vogler, Stefan"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Delanthamajalu, Shwetha"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2025-12","2025-12-01"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text","Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Sociology"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Dissertation"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["Ph.D."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["India","moral policing","queer","Hindutva","gender"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright Shwetha Delanthamajalu 2025"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132787"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["In this dissertation project, I analyze what I consider to be three artifacts constitutive of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) mission to make India a “Hindu” state. I suggest that The Transgender Persons (Protections of Rights) Act 2019, moral policing and the assassination of a journalist all (re)create and help extend Hindu nationalism. While the killing of Lankesh was explicitly violent, I suggest that the Transgender Act and moral policing inflict violence in implicit ways upon queer and transgender people in their everyday lives. In Article 1, I use ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze the Trans Act and the ways it conceptualizes gender. I then bring in the experiences of my participants to show how this Act disregards the lived experiences of trans people and instead is a state tool to collect demographic data about its citizens. In Article 2, I present moral policing as a form of informal social control used by non-state actors to enforce and uphold the Hindutva nationalism and gender ideology. Non-state actors such as aunties, shopkeepers and security guards advance the same ideology as state-actors and help formulate and circulate the Hindutva discourses. I foreground the experiences of my participants to show the everyday impacts of such state-sanctioned gender ideology and moral policing. I unpack how power operates in moral policing and how hegemonic ways of policing queer people are reproduced in queer spaces as well. In Article 3, I examine representations of nation and gender in newspaper coverage of the assassination a woman journalist named Gauri Lankesh. I wonder how a vernacular press journalist like Lankesh could become a martyr for English-speaking intellectual liberals and the English-language media. While both media present different narratives of the murder and its aftermath, they both downplay its gendered implications.","Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2027-12-01","The student, Shwetha Delanthamajalu, accepted the attached license on 2025-12-01 at 12:38.","The student, Shwetha Delanthamajalu, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-12-01 at 12:39.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-12-01 at 16:08.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22996 on 2026-02-19 at 20:09:48"]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Queer life and moral policing in the time of Hindutva"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Marshall, Anna-Maria","Dill, Brian","Atiles, Jose","Vogler, Stefan"],"dc:creator":["Delanthamajalu, Shwetha"],"dc:date":["2025-12","2025-12-01"],"dc:description":["In this dissertation project, I analyze what I consider to be three artifacts constitutive of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) mission to make India a “Hindu” state. I suggest that The Transgender Persons (Protections of Rights) Act 2019, moral policing and the assassination of a journalist all (re)create and help extend Hindu nationalism. While the killing of Lankesh was explicitly violent, I suggest that the Transgender Act and moral policing inflict violence in implicit ways upon queer and transgender people in their everyday lives. In Article 1, I use ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze the Trans Act and the ways it conceptualizes gender. I then bring in the experiences of my participants to show how this Act disregards the lived experiences of trans people and instead is a state tool to collect demographic data about its citizens. In Article 2, I present moral policing as a form of informal social control used by non-state actors to enforce and uphold the Hindutva nationalism and gender ideology. Non-state actors such as aunties, shopkeepers and security guards advance the same ideology as state-actors and help formulate and circulate the Hindutva discourses. I foreground the experiences of my participants to show the everyday impacts of such state-sanctioned gender ideology and moral policing. I unpack how power operates in moral policing and how hegemonic ways of policing queer people are reproduced in queer spaces as well. In Article 3, I examine representations of nation and gender in newspaper coverage of the assassination a woman journalist named Gauri Lankesh. I wonder how a vernacular press journalist like Lankesh could become a martyr for English-speaking intellectual liberals and the English-language media. While both media present different narratives of the murder and its aftermath, they both downplay its gendered implications.","Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2027-12-01","The student, Shwetha Delanthamajalu, accepted the attached license on 2025-12-01 at 12:38.","The student, Shwetha Delanthamajalu, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-12-01 at 12:39.","This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-12-01 at 16:08.","DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22996 on 2026-02-19 at 20:09:48"],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132787"],"dc:language":["en"],"dc:rights":["Copyright Shwetha Delanthamajalu 2025"],"dc:subject":["India","moral policing","queer","Hindutva","gender"],"dc:title":["Queer life and moral policing in the time of Hindutva"],"dc:type":["text","Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Sociology"],"thesis:degree_level":["Dissertation"],"thesis:degree_name":["Ph.D."],"thesis:institution_name":["University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:25:07Z"}