Re-Imagining Trans in Contemporary South Asia: Moving With, Against, and Beyond the State
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 12.3: Re-Imagining Trans in Contemporary South Asia: Moving With, Against, and Beyond the State
Guest Editors: Claire Pamment and Jeffrey A. Redding
For over a decade now, trans activism and trans representation has accelerated in social, legal, political, cultural, and artistic realms across South Asia. While these movements have animated possibilities for trans lives and trans justice, so too have they often perpetuated narrow modes of legitimacy, reproducing hierarchies around gender, class, caste, language, religion, kinship, labor, sexuality, nation, and global capital. Violence against khwaja sira-hijra-kothi-trans persons is rampant, surveillance and policing have ensued, and legislative achievements have been tenuous at best. For example, in 2023, Pakistan’s groundbreaking Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act from 2018 was deemed largely “unIslamic” and unenforceable by Pakistan’s Federal Shariat Court writing in global anti-gender registers, and India’s 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act has mobilized a range of dissent across political, legal, civil, and activist spaces. This special issue invites inquiry into the accelerations and disruptions to trans movements alongside feminist, anti-caste, labor, LGBTQI+ and other mobilizations not only in the contemporary moment but also situating these movements—their histories and genealogies—in and across the changing borders of South Asia.
We build upon a robust body of scholarship that complicates a linear view of state recognition and rights, rather than rendering them as uniformly progressive or as failures, and seeing them as mediated by a host of factors: globalization, NGOization, regional relations and the active participation of khwaja sira-hijra-kothi-trans persons (Dutta 2012, Hossain 2021, Jain and DasGupta 2021, Reddy 2006, Roy 2022). At a moment of further upheavals—neoliberal and/or religious nationalisms, fractured international rights regimes, and democratic populism—we invite re-imaginings of trans in South Asia. We encourage contributions which think alongside queer and trans South Asian scholarship that challenges methodological nationalisms and dominant registers of legality and epidemiology, unsettles the logics of historical recuperation (Arondekar 2023), advances transregional analysis (Chiang 2021), couples aesthetics and politics (Gopinath 2018; Horton 2020; Hossain, Pamment, and Roy 2023; Kapadia 2019; Khubchandani 2020; Pamment and Roy 2023), or questions the subsumption into dominant Western theorizations of rights, identities, and representation.We invite multidisciplinary contributions that foreground imaginative worlds of trans possibility in and across South Asia, including (but not limited to) the following themes:
- Critical regionality
- Laws and legality
- Transnationality
- Aesthetics
- Digital studies
- Medicalized citizenship
- Labor
- Performance and visual arts
- Literary studies
- Film and media studies
- Religion
- Kinship and inheritance
- Caste
- Archives
- Methodology
- Activism
- Anti-carcerality
- Indigeneity or place-making
We welcome scholarly articles 5000-7000 words in length. We also welcome shorter essays 2000-3000 words in length, poetry, artwork and other media, short stories, zines, scripts or script excerpts, interviews, translations, or other innovative scholarly/creative work that fits the theme. Scholars, artists, and activists are all invited to contribute.
Contact:
Claire Pamment (clpamment@wm.edu) and
Jeffrey A. Redding (jeff.redding@unimelb.edu.au)
To submit a manuscript, please visit https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/dup-tsq. Please note that TSQ, like other Duke University Press Journals, has moved to ScholarOne, replacing the prior Editorial Manager platform. If this is your first time using ScholarOne, please register first, then proceed with submitting your manuscript. If you have any difficulties with the process, contact the journal at tsqjournal at gmail.com. All manuscripts must be double-spaced, including quotations and endnotes, and blinded throughout. You must also submit an abstract, keywords, and biographical note at the time of initial submission. Please visit the editorial office's website for a detailed style guide.TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is an academic journal edited by Francisco J. Galarte, Dylan McCarthy Blackston, micha cárdenas, Ciara Cremin, and Abraham B. Weil, and published by Duke University Press. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. One issue of TSQ each year is a non-themed open call, with the other three issues devoted to special themes; every issue also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other special issues, https://femresin.unm.edu/transgender-studies-quarterly/
