Transgender Shifts

Abstract

Abstract A larger game is at play with respect to the field of transgender subjectivities in India that goes beyond gender or sexuality, and enters the arena of contested cultures and historical erasures. It can be hypothesized that a contemporary transgender subject in India finds itself caught between the fading voice of precolonial and colonial history on the one hand, and the strong pull of globalization on the other, creating what can perhaps be imagined as a knotted relation of the (transgender) subject with historicity and temporality. A rather confounding gap lies between premodern conceptualizations of gender and sexuality that reside as cultural memory in the subject, carrying its own paleonymic weight, and the increasingly widening signifier transgender in the contemporary. The task of this article is to explore what can be found at this interstice, which promises a clue that is symptomatic of the shifting sands of culture, history, and memory as they play out in India, and how they may point toward a theorization of sexuality that lies away from its histories in the West.

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