“Radical Interdependence” in the City: On the spatial conditions of navigating queer and trans embodiments in Hyderabad (India)

Abstract

This paper examines how modes of inhabiting and moving through public urban space shape
performances and visibilities of non-normative genders and sexualities. The paper is based on
long-term ethnographic research in Hyderabad (India), which has seen a radical
transformation into a leading center of IT, ITES, and educational industries since the early
2000s. In Hyderabad, large-scale economic change and shifts in municipal planning
authorities have led not only to unprecedented urban growth but also to a de facto
privatization of municipal governance and the exacerbation of striking inequalities. I explore
how these transformations have created urban spaces and built environments with unique
possibilities and constraints for how queer and trans people navigate not only the city but also
their embodied gender and sexual identities in their intersections with class, caste, and race.
Combining a methodology of embodied fieldwork with current developments in queer and
trans theory, the paper explores how gender operates in urban space as a coercive system of
what trans scholar Jules Gill-Peterson calls “radical interdependence”.