Paper short abstract:

This paper illustrates how Indian transwomen workers often advocate for workplace anti-discrimination policies by appealing to the power of business to change lives with reference to their own entrepreneurial practice of somatic transformation and arrival.

Paper long abstract:

To the extent that LGBTQ subjects are recognized in corporate organizational anti-discrimination and inclusion initiatives is often understood in queer theory as necessarily normative: only those suitable to corporate interests gain access to the assumed power and prestige that accompanies the interpellation of social others. In this paper, I take a different approach by suggesting instead that gender and sexual difference is in fact demanded – rather than sacrificed or suppressed – in processes of corporate inclusion. To the extent that queer theory has largely (and rightly) fixed critique on those excluded from institutional accommodations of difference, in this article I argue that gender and sexual difference is perpetually staged as a necessary obstacle by which corporate actors can articulate the need for their expertise to transform difference into something valuable to organizations. By placing queer theory’s focus on normativity into dialogue with anthropological theories of value, I use ethnography to illustrate that the inclusion of LGBTQ folks in novel inclusion exercises in corporate India in fact produces gender and sexual alterity, if only to be targeted for enculturation and exclusion.

To illustrate this, I draw from ethnography conducted in Bengaluru in 2018-19, where I observed transwomen entrepreneurs argue for the importance of their inclusion in corporate workplaces by referencing their own transformation from an urban underclass to a middle-class, and somatically transformed, worker-consumer. I argue for the wider significance in the transformation of urban citizen in neoliberal India, in which workplace protections become contingent on entrepreneurial transformations.