Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the selective inclusion of trans people in the institution of marriage in India, to raise questions about marriage as a technology of governance, its role in reproducing desirable citizens and fracturing community solidarities in the context of growing Hindu nationalism.

Paper long abstract

In the context of growing Hindu nationalism in India, the country’s legal and political landscape has been witness to a narrowing of the vision of citizenship, trivializing differences of caste, disability, race, gender, and religion; and excluding them while entrenching the oppressions they face.

Against this backdrop of the shrinking definition of Indian-ness both in law and the popular imagination, the institution of marriage has become key to the shaping of desirable Indian citizens. Marriage in India has consistently been a fraught issue, arranged between families, key to maintaining caste, religious and class endogamy and controlling sexuality. Today, in addition to existing barriers to the exercise of marital choice, a plethora of new laws requiring the registration of live-in relationships and criminalizing inter-religious unions have intensified the State’s policing of young people’s intimacy and desire.

Though the demand for marriage equality was defeated in the Supreme Court, partial marriage rights have been secured, recognizing the rights of trans people to enter apparently heterosexual marriages and to adopt, thus affirming trans identities further. However, this serves to exclude all other queer people from the institution of marriage. Such selective inclusion demonstrates an instance of differential integration and creates a division within the already fractured queer community in India. This paper examines the process through which this inclusion and consequent exclusion is effected, revealing the centrality of marriage as an institution to the politics of desirability and the Indian State’s stake in controlling marriage as a technology of reproducing desirable citizens.