Nataraj, S. (2022) The Thirunangai Promise: Gender as a contingent outcome of migration and economic exchange. Anti-Trafficking Review, 2022 (19 Spe). pp. 47-65.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
In this paper, I track how social actors in the city of Chennai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu contested the boundaries of thirunangai identity, the preferred Tamil term for transgender women. Using a framework derived from linguistic and economic anthropology, I show how gendered personhood is a contingent outcome of the value and meaning given to migrations and economic exchanges, where migration makes new gendered subjectivities possible while curtailing others. I offer a queer analysis of migration, highlighting how social womanhood is a contingent achievement and a contested status, split along axes of class, caste, religion, language, cis-or transgenderhood, and so forth. Not all persons socially categorised as women marry, migrate or labour in the same way, and gender is never a singular or isolated axis of differentiation. © 2022, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. All rights reserved.