In the 1990s, the term “queer” gained new acceptance within poststructuralist/postmodernist thought. This was an attempt to move away from reproducing the heterosexist binary of heterosexuals and homosexuals. The struggle of queers’, started to be visible in India in 1999 with the Kolkata Friendship Walk, primarily to oppose the hetero-patriarchy. Later, with the emergence of queer theory, queer activists and academicians started to critique the Eurocentric academic construction of “third-gender” identity in the spaces of academia and activism. Furthermore, the emergence of more subaltern queer ethnography and the decolonisation of academia has opposed the Western Anglophonic understanding of gender-sexuality, by uncovering subaltern queer identities and existences. The entire subaltern queer scholarship critiqued and enhanced the framework of transnational trans-queer studies. Looking at South Asia, apart from the patriarchy, the society and culture are having caste as their own and more unique oppressive system. In contemporary India, religious fundamentalism and dogmatic casteism, made the queer spaces more intersectional, by demolishing the marginalised queer voices and existence, such as Dalit, Adivasi, and Bahujan queers. In India, the judgment of SC in 2018, which removed the IPC 377, decriminalized homosexuality, gives freedom of existence and expression of identity to the LGBTQ people constitutionally and opened a forum to fight for marriage equality and other fundamental rights.
This paper will try to describe and discuss different dimensions of intersectional subaltern queer identities of Bengal (West Bengal and Bangladesh), such as Koti, Hijra, Dhurani, Parikh. It will also discuss several contemporary issues faced by the queer community, such as the emergence of Brahminical-Patriarchy in Urban and Cyberspaces and the need for horizontal reservation for the transgender. Gradually this paper will try to critique the Anglophonic construction of the “Third-gender” term, by enhancing the umbrella of “Transgender”, with trans-queer-feminist ethnography.
