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Queer life and moral policing in the time of Hindutva
Delanthamajalu, Shwetha
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132787
Description
- Title
- Queer life and moral policing in the time of Hindutva
- Author(s)
- Delanthamajalu, Shwetha
- Issue Date
- 2025-12-01
- Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
- Marshall, Anna-Maria
- Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
- Marshall, Anna-Maria
- Committee Member(s)
- Dill, Brian
- Atiles, Jose
- Vogler, Stefan
- Department of Study
- Sociology
- Discipline
- Sociology
- Degree Granting Institution
- University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Degree Name
- Ph.D.
- Degree Level
- Dissertation
- Keyword(s)
- India
- moral policing
- queer
- Hindutva
- gender
- Abstract
- In this dissertation project, I analyze what I consider to be three artifacts constitutive of the Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) mission to make India a “Hindu” state. I suggest that The Transgender Persons (Protections of Rights) Act 2019, moral policing and the assassination of a journalist all (re)create and help extend Hindu nationalism. While the killing of Lankesh was explicitly violent, I suggest that the Transgender Act and moral policing inflict violence in implicit ways upon queer and transgender people in their everyday lives. In Article 1, I use ethnography and discourse analysis to analyze the Trans Act and the ways it conceptualizes gender. I then bring in the experiences of my participants to show how this Act disregards the lived experiences of trans people and instead is a state tool to collect demographic data about its citizens. In Article 2, I present moral policing as a form of informal social control used by non-state actors to enforce and uphold the Hindutva nationalism and gender ideology. Non-state actors such as aunties, shopkeepers and security guards advance the same ideology as state-actors and help formulate and circulate the Hindutva discourses. I foreground the experiences of my participants to show the everyday impacts of such state-sanctioned gender ideology and moral policing. I unpack how power operates in moral policing and how hegemonic ways of policing queer people are reproduced in queer spaces as well. In Article 3, I examine representations of nation and gender in newspaper coverage of the assassination a woman journalist named Gauri Lankesh. I wonder how a vernacular press journalist like Lankesh could become a martyr for English-speaking intellectual liberals and the English-language media. While both media present different narratives of the murder and its aftermath, they both downplay its gendered implications.
- Graduation Semester
- 2025-12
- Type of Resource
- Thesis
- Handle URL
- https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132787
- Copyright and License Information
- Copyright Shwetha Delanthamajalu 2025
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Graduate Dissertations and Theses at Illinois PRIMARY
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