UCLA

My dissertation, The Biopolitics of Third Gender Category in India, uses 18 months of ethnographic data and 32 in-depth interviews to investigate how transgender women sex workers in West Bengal negotiate claims to state resources following the Indian Supreme Court’s ruling of a “Third Gender” category in 2014. Significantly, the implementation of this non-binary gender category occurred while “homosexual acts” remained criminalized by the Indian state; for transgender women—especially those who are sex workers. This produced a paradox in which state visibility around gender identity could also expose them to criminalization, depending on how local state actors perceived the legitimacy of transgender women’s claims to womanhood. On the surface, legal recognition of the Third Gender category seems to be steps towards greater inclusivity and gender equity; however, there is currently little research that explores the impact of such legal recognition on the lives of people who identify as gender non-binary. My scholarship addresses this gap by demonstrating that people who fall into the Third Gender category do not necessarily interpret legal recognition as an unambiguous good. Across empirical chapters on state surveillance, sex work, and the family, I reveal how cultural and social structures shape the ways which people interpret, contest, and expand this new category.

The theoretical implications of my research are catalyzed by the premise that much of the sociology of gender in the United States takes the experiences from the West as its point of reference, thereby, erasing and Orientalizing knowledge produced in and about the Global South. My research intervenes into the sociology of gender by centering the experiences of non-Western transgender people. To this end, I analyze how the legal and social categories of transgender and third gender continue to be contested, expanded, and shaped by the politics of social location.

For example, my manuscript, “Gender Calculus: Third Gender, Governance, and Legibility,” addresses the questions: How do transgender people become visible to the state as Third Gender? I find that the Indian state has created the Third Gender category but lacks the mechanisms and methods to account for variations of all genders in an inclusive way and one that respects an individual’s self-determination. The state lacks a pan-Indian law that articulates and enshrines the rights and protections for people in the Third Gender. As a result, as transgender people attempt to become visible to the state, they face ground-level state actors who attempt to arbitrate who falls in this legal category. These ground-level actors engage in what I name gender calculations, a process by which the State renders certain gendered bodies visible while further obscuring others and that are embedded in local gender, class, and caste ideologies. In the context of India, these calculations occur within a context of Brahminical (Caste-based) patriarchy. Specifically, the state and media commonly conflate the Third Gender with Hijra. In this vein, Third Gender communities in India continue to be haunted by the legacy of British colonial law that deemed them “criminal tribes” and cited their existence as evidence of the moral decadence and inferiority of the entire population of the Indian sub-continent. Therefore, investigating the gendered and sexual violence against transgender people in India demonstrates how gender and sexuality have been central to the project of post-colonial nation-building.