Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar Series

The UIC Institute for the Humanities presents the Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar Series with Shilpa Menon, UIC Department of Anthropology, “You Must Learn to Jostle in Like Us: Governance, Cis Feminists, and Trans Politics.”

Set in the Indian state of Kerala, Shilpa Menon’sethnographic dissertation shows how transgender people interrupt state attempts to set up “transgender” as a monolithic legal and welfare category by tracing how they move between a range of state-recognized subject positions — as welfare-seekers, migrants, sex workers, gendered entrepreneurs and oppressed-caste people. Trans people’s consequent engagements with varied social movements, agents of state power and labor regimes are shaped by a relational mode of politics not encompassed by solidarity or conflict. Relational trans politics, she argues, holds valuable lessons for understanding, and at times resisting, the ways in which neoliberal logic shapes the postcolonial welfare state, especially through the appropriation of identity politics.

Email huminst@uic.edu to request a copy of the paper ahead of time.