Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar Series: Shilpa Menon, Department of Anthropology, “You Must Learn to Jostle in Like Us”: Governance, Cis Feminists, and Trans Politics

Set in the Indian state of Kerala, Shilpa Menon’s ethnographic dissertation shows how transgender people interrupt state attempts to set up “transgender” as a monolithic legal and welfare category by tracing how they move between a range of state-recognized subject positions—as welfare-seekers, migrants, sex workers, gendered entrepreneurs, and oppressed-caste people. Trans people’s consequent engagements with varied social movements, agents of state power, and labor regimes are shaped by a relational mode of politics not encompassed by solidarity or conflict. Relational trans politics, she argues, holds valuable lessons for understanding, and at times resisting, the ways in which neoliberal logic shapes the postcolonial welfare state, especially through the appropriation of identity politics.

Paper Abstract:

This chapter examines the relationalities that emerge when trans people seeking a role in participatory democracy face the feminized frontlines of Kerala’sgender and development apparatus—trainers, researchers, social workers, and policymakers who are largely cis women, often from dominant social positions. Through a transfeminist framing, this chapter will locate cis feminist and transgender engagements as an emergent site of gender politics in India, foregrounding her positionality as a cis woman researcher. Drawing upon ethnographic material and media analysis, this chapter looks into the tensions and possibilities that arise when trans people stake claims upon “gender,” a term which bears the baggage of a long history of engagement between state power and cis women. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the status of “gender” as a “proper object” of feminist politics, trans politics, and governance. In doing so, this paper responds to recent calls, amid the trans-feminist "gender wars" in the West, to highlight different sites and histories of trans/feminist relationships.