Journal article
Laboring Dancers, Ruptured Alliances: Trans Politics and the Gendered In/formality of Lagan in India
TSQ : Transgender studies quarterly, Vol.12(4), pp.549-567
11/01/2025
DOI: 10.1215/23289252-11925146
Abstract
The article explores intersections and gaps between Indian trans activism and lagan, or launda naach, a cultural practice in which kothi, hijra, or trans-identified gender-nonconforming people seasonally migrate to North India to dance in culturally female attire at weddings and festivals. Indian LGBTQ+ activists typically view lagan as an occupation in which trans people are subjected to forced sex work, sexual violence, and HIV risk. However, despite earlier activist interest in the “rehabilitation” of lagan dancers, their workplace conditions have largely fallen off the radar of contemporary Indian trans activism. The article argues that this increasing gap symptomatizes an incommensurability between the frameworks of trans legibility and representation that have emerged through Indian activist and state discourses since the 2010s, on one hand, and the particular gendered patterns of economic informality that characterize lagan, on the other. Building on trans and postcolonial analyses of capitalism as a nontotalizing and parasitic process, the article argues that lagan demonstrates how certain conjunctures between economic formalization and informality, and between capitalist and noncapitalist or extracapitalist logics, remain not quite amenable to dominant (neo)liberal forms of trans and LGBTQ+ politics in India.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Laboring Dancers, Ruptured Alliances: Trans Politics and the Gendered In/formality of Lagan in India
- Creators
- Aniruddha Dutta
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- TSQ : Transgender studies quarterly, Vol.12(4), pp.549-567
- DOI
- 10.1215/23289252-11925146
- ISSN
- 2328-9252
- eISSN
- 2328-9260
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 11/01/2025
- Academic Unit
- International Programs; Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures ; Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies
- Record Identifier
- 9985143153402771
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