Toward a “Freedom Life”: Notes on Transmasculine Placemaking in the “World-Class” City of New Delhi

Abstract

The epistemological formations of area studies and critical regionality have been instrumental in situating the politics of gender-sexual variance in the Global South. Recent scholarship in India encourages further rescaling of queer and trans studies to account for the mutual entanglements of sexual and caste modernity, rights-based organizing, and metronormativity. Following this work, this article considers the possibilities offered by emphasizing the micro-locality of the urban neighborhood. A reading of two Delhi-based documentary films, Who Can Speak of Men? (2003) and Yeh Freedom Life (2019), the article troubles the idea of a unitary global and national trans subject. Conceptualizing the urban neighborhood as method and mode of reading transmasculinity compels a rethinking of the dichotomous framings of metropolitan queer as elite and transgender as abject. This article provides a trans microcartography wherein the world- and place-making work of transmasculine people enables a reimagining of masculinity in the neoliberalizing Indian “world-class city”.