Transgressing Places

This chapter looks at dilemmas relating to sex and gendered forms of boundary making. It argues that a central contradiction found in gender categories lies in the mutuality and violence/subordination twin and that this constitutes a particularly biologistic discursive apparatus that feeds into naturalising social relations of subordination within modern societies. Gender lends itself particularly as a stigma or branding that translates into the naturalisation of social effectivities. Positing biological proclivities or psychic traits and predispositions functions to legitimise the different roles that gendered subjects play in the fields of the economic, the political and the representational. Gender categories facilitate exploitation and differential exclusion in ways that invisibilise the forces at play. The forms of domination found in the gender category and its relations appear as forms of symbolic and physical violence. This includes intimate partner violence, familial gender violence and the physical violence inflicted on the bodies of rape victims. Gender categories reinforce the naturalisation of power; they also reinforce dominant national imaginaries and class relations of exploitation. The chapter discusses, within an intersectionally inflected framing, gendered and transnational violence, women’s migrant labour and care work as well as looking at some of the dilemmas faced within feminisms in the transgendering debates that have currently grown in importance.

Geography · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · South Asian Cinema and Culture