Inhabiting the state subjunctively

Transgender life-making alongside death and a pandemic

Datos Bibliográficos

ID15540232
AutoresSayan Bhattacharya (0000-0002-5887-9674, University of Minnesota System, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen17
Número10
Páginas2447-2459
Fecha de publicación2021-09-30
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGlobal Public Health (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1744-1692 • E-ISSN: 1744-1706
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17441692.2021.1986561
PMID34591748
OpenAlexW3203369884
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas13

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, while addressing the United Nations General Assembly on 26 September 2020, stated that India had introduced legal reforms to accord rights to transgender citizens. Even though there is not much material basis to these rights, transgender communities have been protesting against the state and at times negotiating with it to get laws that are more in alignment with their rights. In the wake of serialised deaths and precarity intensified by the Covid-19 pandemic, transgender communities also stage other negotiations in the everyday with activists, transnationally funded NGOs and academics researching their communities, encounters that are not as spectacular as the protests against the state, but that which ensures their daily sustenance. This paper investigates how they inhabit these systemically violent institutions. Deploying ethnographic field notes from eastern India, this paper argues that they inhabit them subjunctively, which is not about refusing engagement with what is oppressive but about the ceaseless conjuring of improvisatory and contingent gestures that are marked by hope as well as uncertainty. The simultaneity of protests, rage, hopelessness, hope, negotiations, supplications and scepticism allow them to not only endure the violence of institutions but also to rupture them and imagine them otherwise

Criminology · Negotiation · Political science · Precarity · Sociology · State (computer science · Sustenance · Transgender · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Migration, Refugees, and Integration