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Accepted Paper:
The epistemic and ethical labor of queer and trans ‘futurity’
Stefan Binder
(University of Zurich)
This paper examines how notions of ‘futurity’ in current scholarship on queer and trans communities in South Asia impose unacknowledged forms of epistemic and ethical labor on those communities by casting them as ‘crises’ for dominant conceptual frameworks of sex, gender, and sexuality.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines the current focus on notions of «emergence» and «futurity» in scholarship on queer and trans sex/gender formations in South Asia. It critically revisits important postcolonial approaches, which critique processes and devices of ‘temporal distancing’ in queer anthropology and ethnographic scholarship more generally. Drawing on my ongoing ethnographic research with queer and trans communities in Hyderabad, the paper seeks to complicate the role of temporal regimes in the ways those communities engage with changing conceptual frameworks of gender and sexuality. I build on recent critical approaches to temporality and futurity in Trans and Intersex Studies to interrogate how certain queer and trans people are made to perform unacknowledged forms of epistemic and ethical labor by being cast as crises for dominant and supposedly ‘Western’ conceptual frameworks of sex, gender, and sexuality.