Reshma Radhakrishnan gives a working paper on ‚‘Strategic Accommodation’ of Diversities: gender norms and identities beyond the binaries‘

Gender diversity is an area that has come to be more and more complex over the years with the troubling of the binary understanding of gender. Queer studies/movements effectively question and complicate the concept, challenging the idea of heteronormativity. This project is concerned with the processes of ‘accommodation’ of gender diversities and heterogeneity. Engaging with the queer movement and queer politics of Kerala, a south-Indian state often praised as one of the most developed among the Indian states in many respects, I look at the case of trans-women of Kerala vis-à-vis the rest of the country, and extend the analysis in the context of the European/transnational experiences. This paper is a small step in this direction. In this paper, I primarily try to introduce the project, contextualise the study and engage with the question of visibility. I engage with the complexity of ‘visibility‘ and critiques to the fights for visibility, and suggest that it has more to do with achieving ‘normalcy‘ than an imposed visibility or hypervisibility.