This article focuses on the 2015 Telangana Queer Swabhimana Walk to explore the relationality of trans activism to questions of culture and region. Documented by Moses Tulasi's film, Walking the Walk (2015), this pride march can be read as a site of decolonial theory-making that reorients the gaze of the mainstream public to hijra and other trans people's historic attachment to land and their fight for justice. The article employs podcast interviews with Tulasi and one of the organizers of the walk, Rachana Mudraboyina, to unpack the distinctiveness of swabhimana (roughly translates to “self-respect”) from globalized notions of pride and caste-based understanding of dignity and respect. In the process, it highlights how working-class trans activists “disidentify” with the Hindu caste system as well as Dalit and anti-caste critiques of sex work to rally for the dignity of their labor and everyday living.
“Jai Hijra, Jai Jai Hijra”: Self-Respect and Performance during the 2015 Telangana Swabhimana Walk
Rajorshi Das is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa. They study contemporary queer and trans narratives emerging out of India across print and digital platforms. As a commitment toward public humanities, they interview activists and artists for their podcast, Queerness and Storytelling in India. Das’ articles have been published in Interventions and Postcolonial Text. Their poems have been part of anthologies such as A Map Called Home (2018) and A World that Belongs to Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia (2020).
Rajorshi Das; “Jai Hijra, Jai Jai Hijra”: Self-Respect and Performance during the 2015 Telangana Swabhimana Walk. GLQ 1 January 2025; 31 (1): 29–56. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11521502
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