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Papers by Shakthi Nataraj
In Aneja, Anu, ed. Women's and Gender Studies in India: Crossings. Taylor and Francis, 2019
Sara Ahmed's article, 'Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology," is oriented around three tab... more Sara Ahmed's article, 'Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology," is oriented around three tables. The first philosopher Edmund Husserl's writing table. In his Ideas: An Introduction to General Phenomenology Husserl reflects on how, even when facing his writing table, he still perceives the verandah behind him, the children playing in the garden, and the world beyond. These objects are not directly perceived, just as he cannot see the table from all angles at once. Rather, his perception is the result of a welter of background knowledge and memories which guarantee the object for him, regardless of its actual presence. In this sense, the object is not just perceived, but "intended through perception" (Ahmed 2006, 548). Ahmed contrasts the seamless joining of Husserl and his table, to the table of feminist philosopher Adrienne Rich. Rich reflects on how just as she begins to write, her children begin pulling at her and playing with her typewriter keys, pulling her attention away to the domestic sphere, the very world of verandahs and families that for Husserl remains comfortably behind his chair. Ahmed's point is that writing tables, and the writing of philosophy itself, appears "naturally" to tend towards husbands and fathers like Husserl, rather than women and mothers, like Rich. Academic objects are not simply perceived; they are intended for the perception of some more than others. In this case, they point to the patriarchy of the structure. The third table Ahmed describes is in the dining room of her family's home. Intended to seat parents, children, nieces and nephews, and surrounded by wedding photos, the table reminds those of the heterosexual lineage that produced them, while directing them to reproduce the "straight line" by having heterosexual families of their own. When unexpected guests sit at the table, they are subject to "straightening devices"; for example, Ahmed's butch lesbian partner is misrecognized by a neighbor as either Ahmed's sister or husband, both positions that align lesbians with the "straight line." When unexpected guests sit at the family table, it produces queer moments that appear fleeting, because they are so quickly stamped out by "straightening devices." A politics of disorientation, Ahmed suggests, should not grandly prescribe paths that the "queer" ought to take, but seek rather to inhabit such queer moments, "listen[ing] to the sound of the 'what' that fleets" (2006, 565). I want to share one such "fleeting moment" that reoriented my own writing table here in Berkeley, where I sit writing my anthropology dissertation. In 2015 I was in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, conducting dissertation fieldwork on how activists advanced competing definitions of the term "transgender." Chennai is my home, and I found myself constantly pulled away from anthropology by my love and commitment to friends and family. I was wandering one day into a Levi's store to help my fourteen-year-old cousin pick out a pair of jeans, when I received a phone call from my friend Gowri. Using my shoulder to press the phone to my ear, I pulled a pair of jeans off the rack, and Gowri demanded, "Queer na enna?" "What is queer?" Gowri was a filmmaker I had befriended a few months earlier, a charismatic and brilliant young activist determined to spread awareness about the term "lesbian" in the Tamil media, and to create safe spaces for lesbians in Chennai. She was working on a documentary about lesbian identity, for which I was one of the resource persons. Stepping out into the shiny air-conditioned food court, I explained as best I could in my inadequate Tamil.
The Social Sciences, 2021
Marriage is near-universal in India, where most cisgender women sex workers have been married at ... more Marriage is near-universal in India, where most cisgender women sex workers have been married at some point in their lives, while also navigating responsibilities to family and children. In this paper, we explore how cisgender women sex workers in Pune, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, experience continuities between sex work and marriage, while navigating an ideological landscape where sex work and marriage are positioned as opposites. Returning to feminist theoretical models that highlight the economic underpinnings of marriage, we outline three arenas in the Indian context where marriage and sex work overlap rather than remaining opposed and separate entities: (a) migration, (b) attributions of respect and stigma, coded through symbols of marriage and sexual availability, and (c) building and dissolving kinship networks that contest the primacy of biological or affinal kin. In each of these realms the distinction between marriage and sex work is a fraught and contested issue, ...
South Asian History and Culture, 2017
ABSTRACT Between 2009 and 2011, there was a dramatic re-emergence in Chennai of a nineteenth cent... more ABSTRACT Between 2009 and 2011, there was a dramatic re-emergence in Chennai of a nineteenth century colonial narrative that ‘eunuchs’ kidnap and castrate children. Although often framed as a ‘legend’ by LGBT rights activists and anthropologists, the narrative was cast here as a police complaint, prompting these very activists to initiate a fact-finding mission, of which I was a part. How could a colonial-era narrative emerge as both fact and fiction, law, and legend, so rapidly fit the language of contemporary moral anxieties, such as sex-reassignment surgery and LGBT rights activism? Using M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘genre,’ I demonstrate that narratives of kidnapping, from the early colonial period onward, have circulated in genres ranging from ethnography and medical jurisprudence to fiction and even pornography. As activists in contemporary Chennai weave together past fragments to make their claims, these historical traces are re-animated in indeterminate, unexpected ways. I suggest that by abandoning fixed notions of genre such as ‘folklore’ or ‘law,’ and focusing instead on how texts circulate between genres, scholars can discover the political stakes for participants in the arena of transgender rights movements in India, including folklorists and ethnographers themselves.
Author(s): Nataraj, Shakthi | Advisor(s): Briggs, Charles L.; Cohen, Lawrence | Abstract: As the ... more Author(s): Nataraj, Shakthi | Advisor(s): Briggs, Charles L.; Cohen, Lawrence | Abstract: As the term “transgender” rapidly gains traction worldwide— becoming, for many, key to accessing state recognition and medical access— it maps in irregular and ambivalent ways onto other legal and cultural frameworks. In India, the Supreme Court has treated the categories of “LGBT” and “transgender” rights in starkly different ways, criminalizing homosexuality while still upholding transgender rights (2013), and then radically reversing its stance in 2018. Rather than assert the singularity of the “local” against the homogenizing impact of the “global,” as some research has done, my dissertation examines the reach and implications of these debates in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu by tracking “transgender imaginaries”: utopian visions that take the figure of the “transgender woman” as a point of departure to imagine how “changing sex” can allow subjects to speak powerful new kinds of radi...
In Aneja, Anu, ed. Women's and Gender Studies in India: Crossings. Taylor and Francis, 2019
Sara Ahmed's article, 'Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology," is oriented around three tab... more Sara Ahmed's article, 'Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology," is oriented around three tables. The first philosopher Edmund Husserl's writing table. In his Ideas: An Introduction to General Phenomenology Husserl reflects on how, even when facing his writing table, he still perceives the verandah behind him, the children playing in the garden, and the world beyond. These objects are not directly perceived, just as he cannot see the table from all angles at once. Rather, his perception is the result of a welter of background knowledge and memories which guarantee the object for him, regardless of its actual presence. In this sense, the object is not just perceived, but "intended through perception" (Ahmed 2006, 548). Ahmed contrasts the seamless joining of Husserl and his table, to the table of feminist philosopher Adrienne Rich. Rich reflects on how just as she begins to write, her children begin pulling at her and playing with her typewriter keys, pulling her attention away to the domestic sphere, the very world of verandahs and families that for Husserl remains comfortably behind his chair. Ahmed's point is that writing tables, and the writing of philosophy itself, appears "naturally" to tend towards husbands and fathers like Husserl, rather than women and mothers, like Rich. Academic objects are not simply perceived; they are intended for the perception of some more than others. In this case, they point to the patriarchy of the structure. The third table Ahmed describes is in the dining room of her family's home. Intended to seat parents, children, nieces and nephews, and surrounded by wedding photos, the table reminds those of the heterosexual lineage that produced them, while directing them to reproduce the "straight line" by having heterosexual families of their own. When unexpected guests sit at the table, they are subject to "straightening devices"; for example, Ahmed's butch lesbian partner is misrecognized by a neighbor as either Ahmed's sister or husband, both positions that align lesbians with the "straight line." When unexpected guests sit at the family table, it produces queer moments that appear fleeting, because they are so quickly stamped out by "straightening devices." A politics of disorientation, Ahmed suggests, should not grandly prescribe paths that the "queer" ought to take, but seek rather to inhabit such queer moments, "listen[ing] to the sound of the 'what' that fleets" (2006, 565). I want to share one such "fleeting moment" that reoriented my own writing table here in Berkeley, where I sit writing my anthropology dissertation. In 2015 I was in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, conducting dissertation fieldwork on how activists advanced competing definitions of the term "transgender." Chennai is my home, and I found myself constantly pulled away from anthropology by my love and commitment to friends and family. I was wandering one day into a Levi's store to help my fourteen-year-old cousin pick out a pair of jeans, when I received a phone call from my friend Gowri. Using my shoulder to press the phone to my ear, I pulled a pair of jeans off the rack, and Gowri demanded, "Queer na enna?" "What is queer?" Gowri was a filmmaker I had befriended a few months earlier, a charismatic and brilliant young activist determined to spread awareness about the term "lesbian" in the Tamil media, and to create safe spaces for lesbians in Chennai. She was working on a documentary about lesbian identity, for which I was one of the resource persons. Stepping out into the shiny air-conditioned food court, I explained as best I could in my inadequate Tamil.
The Social Sciences, 2021
Marriage is near-universal in India, where most cisgender women sex workers have been married at ... more Marriage is near-universal in India, where most cisgender women sex workers have been married at some point in their lives, while also navigating responsibilities to family and children. In this paper, we explore how cisgender women sex workers in Pune, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, experience continuities between sex work and marriage, while navigating an ideological landscape where sex work and marriage are positioned as opposites. Returning to feminist theoretical models that highlight the economic underpinnings of marriage, we outline three arenas in the Indian context where marriage and sex work overlap rather than remaining opposed and separate entities: (a) migration, (b) attributions of respect and stigma, coded through symbols of marriage and sexual availability, and (c) building and dissolving kinship networks that contest the primacy of biological or affinal kin. In each of these realms the distinction between marriage and sex work is a fraught and contested issue, ...
South Asian History and Culture, 2017
ABSTRACT Between 2009 and 2011, there was a dramatic re-emergence in Chennai of a nineteenth cent... more ABSTRACT Between 2009 and 2011, there was a dramatic re-emergence in Chennai of a nineteenth century colonial narrative that ‘eunuchs’ kidnap and castrate children. Although often framed as a ‘legend’ by LGBT rights activists and anthropologists, the narrative was cast here as a police complaint, prompting these very activists to initiate a fact-finding mission, of which I was a part. How could a colonial-era narrative emerge as both fact and fiction, law, and legend, so rapidly fit the language of contemporary moral anxieties, such as sex-reassignment surgery and LGBT rights activism? Using M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of ‘genre,’ I demonstrate that narratives of kidnapping, from the early colonial period onward, have circulated in genres ranging from ethnography and medical jurisprudence to fiction and even pornography. As activists in contemporary Chennai weave together past fragments to make their claims, these historical traces are re-animated in indeterminate, unexpected ways. I suggest that by abandoning fixed notions of genre such as ‘folklore’ or ‘law,’ and focusing instead on how texts circulate between genres, scholars can discover the political stakes for participants in the arena of transgender rights movements in India, including folklorists and ethnographers themselves.
Author(s): Nataraj, Shakthi | Advisor(s): Briggs, Charles L.; Cohen, Lawrence | Abstract: As the ... more Author(s): Nataraj, Shakthi | Advisor(s): Briggs, Charles L.; Cohen, Lawrence | Abstract: As the term “transgender” rapidly gains traction worldwide— becoming, for many, key to accessing state recognition and medical access— it maps in irregular and ambivalent ways onto other legal and cultural frameworks. In India, the Supreme Court has treated the categories of “LGBT” and “transgender” rights in starkly different ways, criminalizing homosexuality while still upholding transgender rights (2013), and then radically reversing its stance in 2018. Rather than assert the singularity of the “local” against the homogenizing impact of the “global,” as some research has done, my dissertation examines the reach and implications of these debates in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu by tracking “transgender imaginaries”: utopian visions that take the figure of the “transgender woman” as a point of departure to imagine how “changing sex” can allow subjects to speak powerful new kinds of radi...