The article on the third wave of feminism focuses on transgender feminism which gives an axis to learn more about the ways how bodily difference becomes a basis for socially constructed hierarchies and helps us see in new ways how we are all inextricably situated in terms of race, sex, gender or ability. It also offers a revisionist history of feminist activism.
The article also explores how practices of social regulation and control operate by attaching transgender stigma to various unruly bodies and not just the “transgendered ones”. transgender phenomena are interesting for feminism, women’s studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, and so forth. But interesting, by itself, is not enough, when hard decisions about budgets and staffing have to be made in academic departments, priorities and commitments actualised through classroom allocations and affirmative action hiring.
The second reading Decolonizing transgender in India talks about the transnational expansion of “transgender” as a rubric of identity and the activism which appear when one looks at the phenomenon from the vantage point of communities and social movements of gender-variant persons in the global South, specifically South Asia. This essay is a set of reflections from the, gender/sexually marginalized communities in eastern India. If “decolonization” implies the ability to freely question, critique, and, if necessary, reject globalizing discourses or practices, this essay considers the conditions of possibility for such critical engagement with the expanding category of transgender.
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