Limits of Democracy - Transgender Women As Political Candidates in India

The world’s largest democracy, provides a running epithet on how the sexual organisation of society maintains control over political representations in organised democracies.

This paper draws from my fieldwork in Telangana, a state in South India, covering the participation of transgender women in local elections. I examine the lived experiences and political strategies (campaigns, political messaging, vote canvassing rallies) of two transgender political candidates in the Telangana State Assembly Election 2024 to unpack how historically persecuted social groups navigate political representation vis-a-vis elections, while carrying the baggage of social misrepresentation. What moral panics does the idea of political representation of transgender persons bear on various constitutive social institutions of a nation-state? Can political representation become a mode of murderous assimilation? What is the story of political representation beyond western geographies? Are some guiding questions for this paper.

The emerging ethnographic insights from Telangana help us to cast a reflexive gaze on the limits of our political systems (democracy). How Repressive State Apparatuses (like the state, police, and bureaucracy) and Ideological State Apparatuses (like religious institutions, family, media and political parties) interact to maintain heterosexuality as compulsory criteria to enter the public domain of politics. And, how representational politics can be a reproduction of the carcerality of gender.

This paper is a part of my broader thesis on the politics of the body and the body of politics in India.