Legible Identities and Legitimate Citizens

Abstract

The article analyzes how conjunctures between Indian activism for gender/sexual rights, the governmental state and transnational developmental agencies create bounded and exclusionary rubrics of gender and sexual identification. I argue that such institutional linkages serve to consolidate rubrics of legible identification that legitimize certain forms of gender/sexual difference for inclusion within developmental programs and citizenship, while other forms of subjecthood and community formation are rendered unintelligible or illegitimate. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in eastern India between 2007 and 2012, the article focuses on male-assigned gender variant same-sex desiring subjects and their interpellation within identitarian categories like transgender and MSM (men who have sex with men). While the globalization of transgender as a form of political identity has promised greater rights and governmental inclusion for gender variant persons, it entails a broader MSM-transgender schema of identification based on a standardized divide between cisgendered homosexuals and male-to-female transgender persons. Various expressions of lower class/caste gender/sexual variance are rendered illegible in this rubric, delegitimizing associated subjects who are left without access to constitutional rights and protections and/or treated as exploitable populations within the development and HIV-AIDS industries.

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