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"I Am Not A Hijra": Transgender Women Claiming Citizenship In South India, Liz Mount

Dissertations - ALL

Through an 18-month ethnographic study conducted with hijras (gender non-conforming people assigned male at birth), newly emerging transwomen, and Dosti, a large NGO in Bangalore, India, this dissertation argues that transgender women claim citizenship by drawing distinct borders between themselves and hijras and positioning hijras as undeserving of the rights of citizenship, thus bolstering their own citizenship claims. This exploration of gender non-conforming people’s citizenship claims in the global South responds to a call for queer studies scholars to consider how citizenship operates among sexual and gender variant people in global South contexts (Richardson 2017). While the identity rubric of …