Shilpa Menon
Resident Graduate Scholars
Anthropology
About
“‘You Can’t Feed Us, But You Will Count Us’: Transgender Politics and State Power in South India”
Shilpa Menon’s ethnographic dissertation project locates itself at a time (2014-2023) of unprecedented legal victories and social protections for LGBTQ+ Indians, marking an uneven shift from criminalization to recognition as a site of state intervention. The project, set in Kerala, south India, 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 politics, it argues, holds valuable lessons for understanding, and at times resisting, the ways in which neoliberal logics shape the postcolonial welfare state, especially through the appropriation of identity politics.