Gayatri Reddy Published Co-authored Graphic Piece in Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ)
Introduction
Gayatri Reddy has just published a co-authored graphic piece in Transgender Studies Quarterly(TSQ) with Shakthi Nataraj.
Title: What Can Hijras Teach Us about Governance, Gender, and Wealth? A Brief and Spectacular Graphic Narrative
Abstract: This is an illustrated social history of how hijras (a community of trans-feminine people) have long served as a linchpin in state regulations of social (dis)order in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The authors trace the social life of laws governing “unruly” communities in the Indian subcontinent, emphasizing how social regulation of gender often emerges from material regulation. Colonial constructions of the “public indecency of eunuchs” and “unnatural offenses” were the pretext for regulating hijra livelihoods, kinship structures, and wealth, allowing the state to acquire land and revenue. More broadly, such constructions of “criminal castes and tribes” also implicated communities beyond hijras, with lingering effects to this day. However, the lives of hijras and other communities transcend the policies of containment, criminalization, and extermination imposed on them, showcasing their persistent ability to thrive in the face of these efforts to govern them. The authors have envisioned their graphic narrative as a teaching tool to engage wider audiences in discussions of how gender, sexuality, caste, labor, and kinship are regulated.
You can view the piece here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article/doi/10.1215/23289252-11925054/407014/What-Can-Hijras-Teach-Us-about-Governance-Gender?guestAccessKey=51386b13-1898-4531-b663-07ad813b11cb
Dr. Reddy is an associate professor in Gender & Women's Studies and Global Asian Studies, and an affiliate faculty in Global Anthropology. She is a sociocultural anthropologist and her research and teaching interests lie at the intersections of sexuality, gender, health, and the politics of subject and community-formation in India, as well as within the immigrant South Asian queer community in the U.S. Broadly, her work interrogates the contours of cultural belonging through the paradoxical dialectic of “alienation and intimacy.”