Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
This paper examines the contestation about khwajasara corporeality—legal, medical and activist claims about the khwajasara body—and how it has been subjected to state projects of welfare and citizenship in South Asia. The khwajasara/hijra body was a suspicious and a transgressive body for the colonial state, but it has become a target of legal and medical forms of knowledge with the transformation of the “transgender” as a new subject of citizenship in South Asia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the khwajasara community in Pakistan, this paper examines how new “grid[s] of intelligibility” (Butler, 2001: 629) informed by legal and medical forms of expertise mediate rights claims as well as fuel social imaginary about khwajasaras—making the body of khwajasara legible as a Gender X citizen while also providing a new political context to which khwajasaras diversely respond. My analysis suggests that the new “citational apparatus” (Mitra, 2020: 111) concerning khwajasara corporeality makes khwajasaras “deserving” subjects of state welfare and protection, but only through introducing new forms of welfare surveillance, mediated by legal and medical experts. The paper suggests that as an object of state intervention as well as a means to elude legibility and demand equality and rights, the body remains central to governmental projects of welfare, governance and citizenship.

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Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2023, Page 43-45
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Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2023, Page 46-47
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Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
Given both the historical and ongoing surveillance and policing of marginalized communities, contact tracing, and other pandemic control measures pose additional dangers to marginalized communities that are not faced by members of dominant communities. While privacy rights have been a point of controversy and uncertainty for all in the face of digital surveillance and the exigencies of the pandemic, LGBTQ+ students may well struggle to assert even those rights to which they are unquestionably entitled. Utilizing a multi-method, multidisciplinary approach, this research examined the information and privacy risks imposed upon or heightened for LGBTQ+ university students by COVID-19, with a focus on the roles of libraries and librarians. This study revealed while the library community has a desire to support its LGBTQ+ patrons, there are less consistently available knowledge and resources, particularly with regards to COVID-19 specific concerns, such as contact tracing.

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