Exclusion and Articulation: Transgender Counter-Public in the Indian Public Sphere

Parul Priya,Anurag Kumar

doi:10.20896/saci.v7i4.556

Abstract

The study attempts to locate transgender counter-public as an alternate public sphere in India. It argues that transgender counter-public is necessitated owing to the exclusionary practices of the Indian public sphere as well as the successive counter-public spheres. The study, further claims that transgender counter-public is constructed by critiquing the marginalisation of transgender people through exclusionary practices, and articulation of concerns linked to transgender people. Public discourse analysis of both discursive arenas—print: newspaper articles, journal articles, autobiographies, biographies, memoir, and others, and non-discursive arenas—activism, pride parade, protests and alike have been adopted as methodology. The study concludes that transgender counter-public achieves the dissemination of their concerns to the wider public that exclusion and discrimination of transgender people are a denial of social justice in the democratic social structure.

Highlights

IntroductionThe notion of the public sphere conceptualises the creation of a Bourgeoisie space, where “private people come together as a public...against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privati[s]ed but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labo[u]r” (Habermas, 1989, p.27)
The idea of the public sphere emerged with the publication The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas
The study foregrounds and imparts the rationale behind transgender people’s counter-public, which is their exclusion from the wider public sphere that does not give any consideration to their existence

Summary

Introduction

The notion of the public sphere conceptualises the creation of a Bourgeoisie space, where “private people come together as a public...against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privati[s]ed but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labo[u]r” (Habermas, 1989, p.27) Such “convivial discussion and rational-critical public debate” (Habermas, 1989, p.28) used to take place in the “coffee houses, the salons, and the...table societies” (Habermas, 1989, p.30). Habermas’ idealistic Bourgeoisie public sphere was critiqued for its exclusionary practices and for failing “to examine other, nonliberal, nonbourgeois, competing public spheres” (Loehwing & Motter, 2009, p.220) which resulted in the formation of counter-publics

Objectives

Methods

Conclusion