Description
Between August 2019 and October 2020, nationwide protests arose against India’s exclusionary Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, Citizenship (Amendment) Act, National Register of Citizens, and National Population Register. This fostered new systems and micro-economies of informal care, led by religious and gender minorities (Muslim women, Sikh farmers, transgender communities), located in physical sites of active resistance (Shaheen Bagh, Chand Bagh, Jama Masjid, Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi-NCR) and virtual spaces (including the Queer Muslim Project, United Against Hate). In this context and at these sites, I examine unpaid carework by transgender communities and Muslim women to understand care in non-monolithic frameworks as (i) queer emancipations, feminist solidarities; (ii) religious deconstructions of “abject” citizenship within hegemonic masculinities of the state;. I critically present caregiving as transgressive resistance, using secondary data and gendered media reportage of protests, alongside interviews with activists, lawyers, transgender and GNC individuals, student leaders, journalists, and members of protest sites. I draw from Charles Taylor’s Ingenious Citizenship, Oishik Sircar’s Spectacles of Emancipation, and Laura Kessler’s Transgressive Caregiving, alongside scholarship from the Global South. The study additionally utilizes primary insights from protests in New Delhi: songs, meals, rituals, faith practices, and anecdotes of care, and arguing for the importance of religion and faith as caregiving and reform in emanciaptory understandings of power, violence, and desire in South Asia.
