The Intercultural Dynamics RICH research group is looking forward to welcome Ankita Mukherjee to Nijmegen to give a guest lecture for our research group, based on the monograph she published with Palgrave Macmillan last year and expanding her argument to reflect on intercultural and transnational aspects of gender nonconforming identities: Beyond Transgender: The Social and Political Lives of Gender Nonconforming People in India.
This talk draws on themes developed in my new book, Beyond Transgender: The Social and Political Lives of Gender Nonconforming People in India, which examines the politics of identity and belonging among gender nonconforming (GNC) people against the backdrop of NGO proliferation and transgender rights reforms in India. While existing scholarship has shown how GNC identities become legible within NGO settings through demands for respectability, international intelligibility, and state recognition, less attention has been paid to how these demands shape understandings of self and others beyond institutional settings. Drawing on thirty-seven in-depth interviews and informed by a social constructionist framework, I examine how participants balance local moral repertoires, embodied practices, and social expectations with transnational norms. The talk advances three primary arguments. First, it contends that GNC identities are provisional, goal-directed, and strategically negotiated. Second, it argues that there is no singular “community” but rather multiple overlapping communities with porous boundaries through which participants structure their social lives. Third, it argues that recent transgender rights legislation in India marks a "negative moment": a dangerous convergence of biopolitical governance, homonormativity, and homonationalism that expands legal recognition while narrowing the possibilities for emancipatory politics. These arguments open up possibilities for imagining justice beyond recognition, centring situated voices, and forging intersectional solidarities across transnational contexts.
Register
The lecture will take place on Monday 28 September in E9.14 from 15:30 until 16:30. Please send an e-mail to ruud.vandenbeuken [at] ru.nl (ruud[dot]vandenbeuken[at]ru[dot]nl) if you are planning to attend.