Apprehending Female Masculinity: Nationalism, Liberalization, and Gender Nonconformity in North India

Abstract

Apprehending Female Masculinity: Nationalism, Liberalization and Gender Nonconformity in North India brings postcolonial studies and queer studies in conversation in order to shed light on the otherwise overlooked subject of queer female-masculinity in contemporary India. Speaking back to the inherent hierarchies of rescue-able and narrate-able lives within homonationalist development models of GLBT social movements, this dissertation argues for a theoretical and political investment in the failed subjectivity of masculine women and transmen. Female masculinity in India embodies a double failure: that of a racialized, postcolonial subjectivity that is perpetually one step outside of modernity and for whom subjecthood itself is foreclosed, as well as that of queer masculinity that is only ever seen as a failed copy of dominant, Hindu nationalist masculinity. And yet the very failure of postcolonial female masculinity becomes the condition of possibility for imagining a new terrain of gender/sexual politics. I examine media and cultural production (documentaries, literary anthologies, ethnography, and pop-culture) to conduct a multi-sited review of how masculine women and transmen negotiate cultural citizenship. By providing an archive of gender nonconforming aesthetic practices in post-liberalization India (1991–present), this project illuminates the ways in which masculine women simultaneously embody and resist Hindu nationalist and global standards of neoliberal “modern” masculinity. The broader implications of the set of arguments presented here serve to explore the contradictions within identity formation in globalization and reconstitute notions of the political. The aim is to demonstrate how globalizing models of gender/sexual identity formation may be unevenly established as well as challenged by the aesthetic practices and self-making performances of gender nonconforming subjectivities that have not yet been taxonomized.