Browsing by Subject "transgender studies"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Lifemaking alongside Death: Violence, Care and the Everyday in Trans communities in India
    (2022-06) Bhattacharya, Sayan
    How do transgender communities disrupt and exceed the overdeterminations of their lives by structural oppression and death? My research investigates this question through a granular attention to the everyday of transgender life worlds in India. Despite the decriminalization of homosexuality and state recognition of the right to gender expression, transphobia, medical negligence, murders and suicides are still the daily realities that trans communities are forced to confront. My dissertation project, Lifemaking alongside Death: Violence, Care and the Everyday in Trans Communities in India, argues that trans communities devise various improvisatory and innovative strategies to make life in an environment signified by violence. I stage conversations between anthropologies of the everyday, trans and queer literatures on care and anti-caste scholarship to study the efforts needed to reproduce an everyday that can be inhabited. These effortful strategies range from gestures that seek pleasure, negotiations with the nation state on demands of welfare to the performance of care labor for each other and devising dark humour on death that help trans people not only endure violence but also to refuse its overdeterminations of trans life.
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    Trans/materiality: Digital Media and the Production of Bodies
    (2021-11) Gentleman, Rye
    There are many instances in scholarly writing and pop culture in which transgender identity is invoked as a metaphor for the fragmenting, decentering, and virtualizing effects of digital media and technologies, contributing to cultural tropes that imagine transgender people as unreal, futuristic, and unknowable. In response, this dissertation argues for an understanding of the link between digital technologies and the post-1990s iteration of transgender as a material, historical assemblage composed (at least partially) of media elements, bodies, and systems such as surveillance culture and big data that participate in processes of gendering and racialization. In attempting to rethink the trans/digital technology assemblage in a way that accounts for the material reality of trans bodies, practices, and lived realities and the material stuff of digital culture, each chapter engages with a specific material aspect of new media. Engaging with each of these different types of media necessitated using slightly different methods in each chapter including social research (primarily interviews), cultural analysis, and autoethnography. Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism, which proposes a posthuman model of performativity that takes into account nonhuman entities, is employed throughout the project. This makes possible a nuanced theorization of the trans body, one that does not stop at the enactment of gender at the body’s surface but also takes into account the way that trans bodies materialize in concert with a host of other matter, beings, and forces, including digital media and technologies. At times my analysis suggested that trans/digital encounters produce a productive trans friction that creates new possibilities for trans modes of being. At other times, my analysis suggested that trans/digital encounters result in transnormative efforts to eliminate friction. The variability of these findings exposes the incongruousness of the trans/digital technology metaphor which attempts to fix transness as a stable entity that can stand in for specific qualities of digital technologies and media. Instead, this project shows that transness is situational and that the relationship between transness and digital technologies is multivalent.