Schlagwort: gender norms

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

This paper engages with the ways and processes through which gender diversities are accommodated. Taking the case of trans women of Kerala, a small South-Indian state known for its high development indices despite low economic growth, the paper discusses the processes which involve different approaches to activism and their varying receptions . The transgender communities in Kerala today, when compared to the rest of the country, at the outset although certainly arguably enjoy a surprisingly respectable status. With exceptions, they are no longer forced to run away to a strange city that does not even speak their language. An emerging trend in this context is the ‘trans marriages’, or the heterosexual conjugality practiced by trans women and trans men. Using excerpts from interviews and interactions with ten trans women who are popular and at the forefront of the present day movement, and other secondary materials to support, the attempt is to understand and analyse the drastic changes and developments that happened within a very short time-span. The relevance of the questions I ask is in the changed social and political context where the law, the state and the civil society are accommodative of and more open and sensitive than before to sexual and gender diversities.

Having done this, the paper goes on to introduce the case of trans men, and proposes to make sense of the articulations of masculinities by the trans men of Kerala as an assignment for the future.

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.