Globalizing through the Vernacular Kothis, Hijras, and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India Aniruddha Dutta

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dutta, Aniruddha, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gender identity.

Sexual minorities.

Trans people.

India.

LGBTQ+ people.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 pages)

Edition:

1st edition

Distribution:

London Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) 2024

Place of Publication:

London Bloomsbury Academic 2025

System Details:

text file HTML

Summary:

Globalizing through the Vernacular analyzes the relation between dominant frameworks of LGBTQ+ identity in India and non-elite, non-metropolitan communities such as kothis and hijras, a spectrum of feminine-identified people usually assigned male at birth. Going beyond the well-known 'third gender' hijra community, this is the first book to study the discourses and practices of related but underrepresented groups like kothis and dhuranis in small-town and rural India while simultaneously examining their relation to and role within LGBTQ+ identity politics. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, the book demonstrates that non-elite groups facilitate the transregional expansion of organized queer politics and become more consolidated as gender/sexual identities in the process. Yet, they often remain irreducible to emerging identity categories and become subordinated through hierarchies of scale and language that serve to contain such communities and related discourses as local and vernacular. The book shows how this process, in effect, denies them an equal role in transnational LGBT politics; reinforces class/caste hierarchies within and beyond queer communities; and delegitimizes or erases articulations of gender/sexual difference that contravene dominant understandings of gender/sexual identity aligned with transnational capitalism, liberalism, or nationalism. Simultaneously, it reveals how non-elite communities rearticulate dominant identity categories in more equal, liberatory ways

Contents:

Introduction: Toward a Theory of Vernacularization Chapter 1: The Scalar Emergence of the Hijra Chapter 2: Kothi and the Sexual Cartography of MSM Chapter 3: Vernacularization and Non/linear Gender among Kothis Chapter 4: Globalizing Ontologies of Transgender Chapter 5: The MSM-Transgender Divide Chapter 6: Metropolitan Queers and their Others Afterword: Afterlives of the Vernacularized Bibliography Index

ISBN:

9781350382800

OCLC:

1470855808

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license