Queer life and moral policing in the time of Hindutva

Delanthamajalu, Shwetha

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132787 Copy

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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