2026-09-22T20:13:52Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/132787 2026-03-24 col_2142_5131 col_2142_14851 com_2142_5130 com_2142_14849 com_2142_8903

application/pdf en text Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'Closed Access', the embargo will last until 2027-12-01 The student, Shwetha Delanthamajalu, accepted the attached license on 2025-12-01 at 12:38. The student, Shwetha Delanthamajalu, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2025-12-01 at 12:39. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2025-12-01 at 16:08. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #22996 on 2026-02-19 at 20:09:48 Queer life and moral policing in the time of Hindutva Delanthamajalu, Shwetha 2025-12-01 Marshall, Anna-Maria Marshall, Anna-Maria Dill, Brian Atiles, Jose Vogler, Stefan India moral policing queer Hindutva gender eng 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. 2025-12 Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/2142/132787 Copyright Shwetha Delanthamajalu 2025 Sociology Sociology University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. Dissertation