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

Abstract (English)

Globalizing through the Vernacular analyzes the relation between dominant frameworks of LGBTQ+ identity in India and non-elite, non-metropolitan communities such as kothis, dhuranis, 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 such as 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 and trans politics across South Asia and become more consolidated as gender/sexual identities in the process. Yet, they often remain irreducible to emerging LGBTQ+ 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 proposes the analytic framework of ‘vernacularization’ to theorize this process, where ‘vernacularization’ is not understood as per its common meaning of the translation or adaptation of global or transnational discourses into local or vernacular languages or idioms. Rather, the book draws on feminist and queer/trans theories of scale as well as postcolonial and sociolinguistic scholarship on language to retheorize ‘vernacularization’ as a shifting, multilayered process of linguistic and scalar hierarchization through which languages, communities, and discourses get positioned as ‘local’ and/or ‘vernacular’ in the first place. The book shows how the process of vernacularization, in effect, denies the aforementioned kothi-dhurani communities an equal role in transnational LGBTQ+ 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, and/or nationalism. Simultaneously, the book reveals how non-elite communities may rearticulate dominant discourses of LGBTQ+ identity and rights in more equal and liberatory ways. As a book that studies how hierarchies of scale and language reproduce inequalities of class, caste, gender, and sexuality in queer and trans communities, this monograph is of relevance to scholars and students of multiple disciplines engaged with social justice, including anthropology, feminist studies, queer and transgender studies, and South Asian studies.