Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the life-worlds of people of transgender and people who practice same-sex sexualities in India. Participatory photographic work explored the relationship between subjectivity, everyday experience, social transformation and cultural continuity in the context of modernizing and enduring socio-sexual values.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores and portrays social changes and cultural continuities in the lives and life-worlds of people of transgender and people who practice same-sex sexualities in contemporary India. Based on participatory photographic projects with same-sex attracted and transgender people in West Bengal, the aim of the research was to work with people in complicating prevailing narratives that associate economic liberalization, modernity and development with the emergence of new identities and social acceptance for so-called 'gender and sexual minority peoples.' Whilst India is certainly witnessing social changes of this kind the intimate aspirations of gender and sexual minority peoples are not necessarily bound-up with claiming new identities and explicit social recognition or rights. Indeed, for many research participants a sense of sexual subjectivity was not meaningfully expressed via the language of identity. Sexual and gender categories were often experienced as reductive. Moving beyond a purely linguistic register, therefore, the present research offered a creative space for the exploration and representation of socio-sexual life-worlds in other, visual terms. Based on community photography projects with transgender and same-sex attracted people the research not only sought to portray more subtle stories of changing sexual values in India but also to provide new visual routes into the exploration of subjective experience within ethnographic research. Photography did not perform an illustrative function but was taken forward from a phenomenological anthropological perspective, especially concerned with capturing socio-sexual life-worlds pre-linguistically and as intrinsic to everyday practices and perceptions.