Promise of Anger and Dissident Kinship

Abstract

Abstract This article interrogates and explores the value, potential, politics, and limits of anger in queer and trans kinship. Taking into account dominant forms of anger as exclusionary and marginalizing and subversive forms of anger as transformative and coalitional, this article centers anti-caste queer political moments and Dalit queer assertions and modes of political organizing to understand how anger is mobilized in the Indian context, the significance it accrues, and the meanings it assumes. This article seeks to understand how certain forms of anger become legitimized in the name of queerness, homogeneity, and strategic necessity while anger, and political wisdom revealed through it, embodied by multiply marginalized, oppressed-caste trans and queer people come to be vilified, stigmatized, pathologized, and marked as an expression of betrayal. The notion of illegitimacy associated with oppressed-caste trans and queer people's anger reveals casteism within queer spaces and exposes the threat such subversive anger and wisdom poses to casteist pragramatism and universality sought by dominant-caste queer people. This article shows the work that both dominant and subjugated forms of anger do and what it means for queer and trans kinship.