“Is this a type of person, too?” : Gender as an assessment of moral character in Tamil Nadu’s transgender-identified communities

Nataraj, Shakthi (2023) “Is this a type of person, too?” : Gender as an assessment of moral character in Tamil Nadu’s transgender-identified communities. In: British Association for Applied Linguistics Gender and Sexuality Special Interest Group, 2023-05-02, University of Brighton.

Abstract

In the past two decades the term “transgender” has gained rapid traction in India, mapping in diverse ways onto existing conceptualizations of gender and sex. This paper examines how kothi and transgender-identified community members in Chennai assess a person’s moral worth and socio-economic predicament by contesting their gender identity. Kothi refers to a person who presents as male but is a “woman at heart”, without undergoing surgical transition. In the 1990s, kothi became a shorthand for the epidemiological category “Men who have Sex with Men” used by HIV/AIDS prevention programs (Dutta and Roy 2014). In practice, however, kothi can be indexed by male, female and neuter pronouns and used as an affectionate address for all persons assigned male at birth, cis- or trans, straight or queer, casting playful doubt on their sex, gender and moral conduct, and exposing the fragile foundations of social “maleness” itself. In this paper I analyse the political stakes of switching between linguistic genders by analyzing a live performance of a kothi-authored Tamil short story in Chennai. Raji, a kothi in female drag, picks up a naïve male client at Chennai’s iconic Marina beach, tricking him into believing she is a poor cisgender sex worker. Suspended between hairy maleness and high-pitched femaleness, the narrator refuses to show readers what “really” lies between Raji’s legs. I draw on concepts from queer linguistics (Hall 2005) and Bakhtin’s sociological poetics (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1985) to analyse how participants assessed the protagonists’ gender and behavior in relation to historical processes including the rise of India’s IT sector, the changing sex work economy, the emergence of transgender politics, and the availability of HIV/AIDS medication. My paper illuminates the shifting socio-economic landscapes that construct maleness and femaleness, and the profound economic and political implications of transitioning between genders both linguistically and surgically.