Aniruddha Dutta: The Vernacular(ized) Queer: Kothis, Hijras, and LGBTQ Politics in India

Since the 1990s, LGBTQ identities and movements have gained visibility in the Indian public sphere and pushed the state to concede some degree of rights and recognition. This talk explores how these developments have resulted in selective and constrained forms of representation and upward mobility for non-elite, non-metropolitan communities such as kothis and hijras, an overlapping spectrum of rans feminine people often assigned male at birth. Drawing on my forthcoming book Globalizing through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras, and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India, I will explore how these communities facilitate the transregional expansion of organized queer politics, yet often remain irreducible to emerging identity categories and become subordinated through linguistic and scalar hierarchies that reinforce class and caste inequities within and beyond LGBTQ communities. To understand this process, the book offers the analytic of ‘vernacularization’ – not in its usual sense as the translation of global/transnational discourses into the local or vernacular, but as the positioning of certain communities and discourses as local/vernacular in the first place. The talk will explore how this process denies vernacularized communities an equal role in (trans)national LGBTQ politics and delegitimizes or effaces articulations of gender/sexual difference that contravene dominant
understandings of gender/sexual identity aligned with transnational capitalism, liberalism, caste, and/or nationalism. Simultaneously, it will explore how non-elite communities rearticulate dominant LGBTQ discourses in more liberatory ways.

Aniruddha Dutta is an Associate Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. Dutta’s research interests include transnational sexualities, globalization, development, political economy, and the institutionalization of gender and sexual politics in India. Their work has appeared in journals such as Transgender Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Feminist Review, Gender and History, and South Asian History and Culture. Dutta’s book Globalizing through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India, is scheduled for publication with Bloomsbury Academic in late 2024. Dutta also works as a volunteer and advisor with several collectives of trans and gender non-conforming communities such as kothis and hijras in eastern India.