Vernacularized Values: Economic Mainstreaming and Shifting Valuations of Trans-Kothi-Hijra Labor in Eastern India

Abstract (English)

Since the 2010s, transgender people have become constructed as subjects of both legal rights and economic empowerment in India (Bhattacharya 2019). However, for the trans feminine spectrum of kothi and hijra people in eastern India, the promise of economic mainstreaming has often remained unrealized or resulted in precarious or irregular employment, similar to patterns observed elsewhere in South Asia (Mokhtar 2021). Meanwhile, older trans/kothi/hijra professions such as blessing people for money or dancing at weddings face increasing challenges and/or stigma. In this context, this paper will examine how shifting processes of linguistic and scalar hierarchization affect how the gendered labor of trans and kothi/hijra people is perceived, (de)valued, and rendered (il)legible. Building on ethnographic research in West Bengal, eastern India, I will examine how the subordination of kothi-hijra languages and discourses relative to Anglophone LGBTQ+ rights discourse feeds into the devaluation of their labor within both the ‘formal’ corporate sector and the ‘informal’ economy. My analysis will build on my recent book 'Globalizing through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras, and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India' (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), which retheorizes ‘vernacularization’ not as the translation or adaptation of global discourses into the local or vernacular, but as a multilayered and unstable process through which languages, communities, and discourses get positioned as local/vernacular. In this paper, I will explore how vernacularization shapes both emerging markets of trans labor and the apparently declining value of ‘traditional’ kothi-hijra professions, and how kothi-hijra discourses demonstrate alternative valuations of labor that are often erased by mainstream ideologies of economic productivity. I will argue that attending to such vernacularized notions of value and labor might be crucial to building more equitable and gender-just economies.