Conférence sur le thème « Trans Female Performers In India and Cultures of Exclusion », en ligne, 28 février 2022.
« For female performers, in particular, this was stark. Performing in public or in front of men was incompatible with married life and domestic respectability for women. Female performers, therefore, did not marry (or not in typical ways), and could be described as courtesans, though of varying statuses and kinds. Much less known is another kind of female performer who used to exist in India within elite and other contexts: cross-dressed males, including those who could be termed as trans, queer, MSM, or non-binary. Such performers have undergone a comparable process of exclusion to the courtesans, though they are much less known or researched. They still exist, as do courtesans, at lower levels of the cultural hierarchy, increasingly illicit zones, strongly bifurcated from middle class, mainstream performing arts, whether classical or Bollywood. In this talk, I explore this world of trans-female performers, the cultures of exclusion that reshaped the social and cultural spaces they occupy in the reform period, and how the global LGBTQ+ movement has affected them. »
Lien zoom : https://bit.ly/3KibLMY.