Category Status Reclamation: How a Marginalized Gender Reclaimed Its Status

Abstract

In 2019, a highly marginalized gender minority in India gained recognition as the first and only transgender monastic order (Kinnar Akhara) in a set of thirteen Hindu religious monastic orders that had been male dominated for more than a millennium. This is significant given that gender inequality is a persistent grand societal challenge, but the term tends to evoke the gender binary while transgenders continue to face violence and discrimination around the world. Gender is a social category and the persistence of gender inequality has been attributed to a difference of status. Thus, we take gender inequality as a case of category status inequality and study the category status change achieved by the Kinnar Akhara towards drawing insights for addressing gender inequality. We conduct a qualitative empirical study using 4 years of archival data between 2015 and 2019 from the public sphere, and find that the Kinnar Akhara referred to multiple histories to influence status beliefs about the third gender, make status claims and elicit status grants. The Kinnar Akhara leveraged constitutional, civilizational, and national histories to achieve its goal of reclaiming high status for the third gender. We contribute to the literature by proposing the idea of status reclamation as a return to high status after status loss, supporting the idea of dynamism in category status systems and demonstrating how religion may be used as a resource to address gender inequality.