Trans/itory Belongings: At the Borders of Skin and Citizenship

This essay discusses the case of Shivi, a transgender South Asian American who won a legal case in New Delhi against their parents, who tried to force Shivi to stay in India and live as a cisgender person. These acts of transphobic domestic violence were challenged by queer activists and judiciaries in India. With Shivi’s case serving as a starting point, this essay considers how South Asian diasporas imagine India to be sexually conservative in disturbing ways that do a disservice to the vitality of queer and feminist movements in the Global South. By looking at Hijras and other gender dissident communities within this context, this essay also suggests that a globalized grammar of LGBTQI rights ignores genealogies of gendered transgression and queer activism in non-Western contexts. I discuss national borders and the boundaries/borders of bodies as spaces of gendered translation, transgression and untranslatable violence