UC Berkeley

As the term “transgender” rapidly gains traction worldwide— becoming, for many, key to accessing state recognition and medical access— it maps in irregular and ambivalent ways onto other legal and cultural frameworks. In India, the Supreme Court has treated the categories of “LGBT” and “transgender” rights in starkly different ways, criminalizing homosexuality while still upholding transgender rights (2013), and then radically reversing its stance in 2018. Rather than assert the singularity of the “local” against the homogenizing impact of the “global,” as some research has done, my dissertation examines the reach and implications of these debates in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu by tracking “transgender imaginaries”: utopian visions that take the figure of the “transgender woman” as a point of departure to imagine how “changing sex” can allow subjects to speak powerful new kinds of radical “truth,” performatively inaugurating new ethical worlds. Transgender imaginaries imply competing “models of sex” (Plemons 2017): metapragmatic models held by social actors, of what constitutes “sex,” where it resides, how it is produced, how it is exposed, and what implications “sex” transformations have for the social body at large. I track how my interlocutors continually used the concept at different scales, indexing broad cultural anxieties, while paradoxically marking specific bodies.

Chapter I examines how narratives about hijras—India’s iconic transgender community of ritual specialists—were interpreted in radically different ways in Chennai by journalists, human rights activists, doctors, public health officials and transgender-identified subjects, indexing anxieties about changing practices of kinship in Chennai, the neoliberalization of healthcare, and the incursion of “foreign” NGOs. Chapter II examines the figure of the thirunangai (meaning “Respectable Woman” in Tamil). “Thirunangai imaginaries” combine models of sex drawn from (a) the pro-Tamil, anti-caste ideologies of the Dravidian movement; (2) transnational models of sex change; and (3) pan-Indian “exposure models of sex” where sexed body parts, kinship affiliation, ascetic practice, and verbal license are imagined together to produce an ethical subject. Chapter III examines how the term koti— meaning an effeminate male— has circulated between the 1990s and the present in human rights documents, autobiographical stories, and jokes in Chennai, indexing the contingency and boundaries of what constitutes “maleness. Together these reveal the instability and ethical horizons of what “sex” is.