Globalizing through the Vernacular: Gender/sexual Transnationalism and the Making of Sexual Minorities in Eastern India A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Aniruddha Dutta IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Richa Nagar, Jigna Desai May 2013 © Aniruddha Dutta, 2013. i Acknowledgements The fieldwork that underlies this dissertation would not have been possible without the help and guidance of my kothi, dhurani and hijra friends and sisters who have so generously invited me into their lives and worlds. Furthermore, numerous community activists, leaders and staff members working in community-based and non-governmental organizations shared their time and insights and included me into their conversations and debates, for which I am deeply grateful. I would especially like to thank the communities, activists and staff associated with Madhya Banglar Sangram, Dum Dum Swikriti Society, Nadia Sampriti Society, Koshish, Kolkata Rista, Gokhale Road Bandhan, Kolkata Rainbow Pride Festival (KRPF), Sappho for Equality, Pratyay Gender Trust, PLUS, Amitié Trust, Solidarity and Action Against the HIV Infection in India (SAATHII), Dinajpur Natun Alo Society, Nabadiganta, Moitrisanjog Society Coochbehar, and Gour Banglar Sanhati Samiti. The detailed review and inputs by my advisers and committee members have been invaluable and have helped shape and improve the dissertation in more ways than I could enlist. I am particularly grateful to my co-advisers, Prof. Richa Nagar and Prof. Jigna Desai for their consistent and meticulous mentorship, guidance, advice and editorial inputs, which have shaped the manuscript in innumerable ways, and without which this dissertation could not have been completed on schedule. Many of the arguments contained in the dissertation were developed in conversations with Prof. Ajay Skaria. Prof. David Valentine provided important comments and leads at a crucial formative stage of the project. Prof. Simona Sawhney has been a close and critical reader from the inception of this project; while I cannot claim to have done justice to her questions and comments, this dissertation would certainly have been much poorer without them. Prof. Jacquelyn Zita was one of the key people who encouraged me to transfer into the department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and subsequently her support and guidance have helped sustain my graduate career and the dissertation project. I am sure that these conversations will continue to guide the project far beyond this dissertation. Last but not least, heartfelt thanks to my friends and family members, who not only sustained me through the years of graduate school but also provided many invaluable conversations and insights which have shaped and enriched my intellectual and personal journey through this project. Ma, Baba, Diya, Bubu, Didibhai, Gargi, Debashree, Courtney, Elakshi, Abir, Karla, Alicia, Aishwarya, Sahana, Meghna, Raina, Arunava, Sujay, Suzanne, Bini, Santosh, Bikas-da, Avijit, Paku, Bapi, Arghya, Sushanta-da, Rajarshi-da, Pawan-da, Ranjita, Souvik, and the many others who have befriended and supported me during fieldwork – all of you were the condition of possibility for this project, and will continue to guide and inspire me many years beyond the dissertation. ii Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to Dida, for sowing the seeds of my personal and intellectual journey iii Abstract The dissertation explores how the globalizing expansion of LGBT and HIV-AIDS activism into global south locations such as India relies on transregional and translocal communities of gender/sexually variant persons, and yet subordinates them and associated discourses of gender/sexual difference within the tiered hierarchies of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender; particularly GTB) organizations and transnationally- funded HIV-AIDS intervention projects. Engaging with conversations and debates across transnational sexuality studies, transnational feminism, Marxist theories of capital, and literary approaches to cross-cultural translation, I argue that the globalizing expansion of gender/sexual identity and rights based politics in India takes place through mutually transformative, yet structurally constrained, intersections and translations between institutions such as funders, non-governmental organizations and the state on one hand, and networks, communities and subcultures of socio-economically marginalized gender/sexually variant persons (such as kothis, dhuranis and hijras) on the other. Such transformative interactions both create new political possibilities, and reproduce hierarchies related to location, class, caste, gender/sexual marginality and social respectability. Even as translations with subcultural languages of gender/sexual variance enable the transnational expansion and hegemony of institutional categories of identity and representation, lower class/caste communities and discourses become positioned as ‘local’ or ‘vernacular’ relative to national and transnational formations of activism and discourse. On one hand, the reification of communities as ‘sexual minorities’ and as local variants of transnational categories like transgender or ‘men who have sex with men’ results in identitarian distinctions such as the homosexual/transgender divide that selectively enable certain political possibilities, but constrain many contextually flexible lived practices and fluid subject positions that become unintelligible in terms of emerging cartographies of identity. On the other hand, liberal discourses that valorize individual choice and gender/sexual fluidity may also elide mobile negotiations with privilege and power (such as locally variable distinctions between feminine insiders and masculine outsiders) in kothi, dhurani and hijra communities. Further, dominant forms of activism based on discourses of equal rights and the private/public divide often cast lower class/caste persons and related practices as uncivil and/or criminal. Drawing upon five years of ethnographic research in eastern India, the dissertation critiques how hegemonic forms of identity and rights based politics produces lower class/caste groups as a victimized minorities and exploitable labor pools, rather than as active and full participants in the transnational movement for LGBT rights. iv Table of Contents List of Tables:………………………………………… v List of Figures:……………………………………… vi Introduction:…………………………………………..… 1 Chapter 1: An Epistemology of Collusion: Hijra and the Historical (Dis)continuity of Gender/Sexual Identities in Eastern India……………..... 69 Chapter 2: The Cartography of MSM: The Consolidation and Vernacularization of the Kothi in the HIV AIDS Industry…………………………138 Chapter 3: Globalizing Transgender in Eastern India: Transition Narratives, Quantitative Femininity and the MSM/TG Divide…………………… 205 Chapter 4: (En)gendering Desires: The Specter and Materiality of the Kothi in Incommensurate Temporalities of Gay Emergence………279 Chapter 5: Claiming Citizenship, Contesting Civility: Decriminalization, Pride Activism and the Regulation of Civic Space………………………. 367 Conclusion: Ethnography as the Politics of Friendship: Participant Observation and the Space-time of Academia………………………………….471 Bibliography:…………………………………………… 490 v List of Tables Table 1. Partial list of NGOs and CBOs working in West Bengal and India: p. 154. vi List of Figures Fig. 1. City of Kolkata, Nadia district, and Murshidabad district, West Bengal: p. 91 Fig. 2: High Risk MSM as defined in NACP-III: p. 181 Fig. 3. Picture of parikh, condom and kothi at Sangram’s DIC: p. 193 Fig. 4. Classification of ‘primary identities’ in the MTH rubric, Project Pehchan: p. 250 1 Introduction I. Ranajay’s Story: Cruising Globalization through the ‘Line’ The ruling [the 2009 reading down of Section 377, the anti-sodomy provision of the Indian Penal Code] is historic in a country where homosexuals face discrimination on a daily basis… it also promises to change the discourse around sexuality in a largely conservative country, where even talking about sex is largely taboo… Gay rights activists all over the country welcomed the ruling and said it was ‘India’s Stonewall’. (‘Gay sex decriminalized in India’, BBC, 2nd July 2009) In 1988, I first went to the lakes [of south Kolkata]. One evening, I heard someone call out, ‘hey, this boy is a dhurani!’ (…) I could not understand what the person had said; I went back and asked, ‘what did you call me? What is dhurani?’(…) Since that day, I started learning this language (bhasha), noting down new words, and even staying up nights and studying them by the light of the lantern, so that I would not be excluded from the dhurani shomaj (dhurani society, circle or network). One day, some hijras visited my neighborhood; I overheard them use the language. I told them, mashi (aunt), I can understand what you are saying. They said, are you kothi? I replied, no, but I am liner (of the line)! (Interview with Ranajay; translation and parentheses mine) Ranajay is a thirty-something year old ‘gay rights activist’ in a position of leadership within a community-based organization or CBO that works for the sexual health and rights of ‘sexual minorities’, primarily those designated through the terms MSM (men who have sex with men) and TG (male-to-female transgender) in the discourse of HIV- 2 AIDS prevention. Marking the close association between sexual rights activism in India and HIV-AIDS funding for persons assigned male at birth, Ranajay is also a part-time