Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Indian Cultural Discourse

Indian feminist cultural studies emerged from and against both Western feminist theory and Indian nationalist and religious discourse, requiring scholars to develop frameworks attentive to caste, religion, region, and class rather than treating 'woman' as a universal, undifferentiated category. Chandra Talpade Mohanty's influential critique of Western feminist scholarship, in 'Under Western Eyes' (1988), argued that much Western feminist writing constructed a monolithic, victimised 'Third World woman' as an implicit foil to an assumed liberated Western subject, a critique with direct relevance to how Indian women have been represented in international media and scholarship.

Sharmila Rege's Dalit feminist standpoint theory, discussed also in sociology, made a specifically cultural-studies intervention by treating Dalit women's autobiographical writing (testimonio) as a distinct genre and a crucial corrective to both upper-caste-dominated Indian feminism and gender-blind Dalit politics, arguing that the specific experience of caste-based sexual violence and labour exploitation could not be adequately theorised through either framework alone.

The queer studies strand of Indian cultural studies has examined both pre-colonial textual traditions — such as depictions of gender fluidity and same-sex desire in Sanskrit, Persian, and Urdu literature, and hijra communities with centuries-documented cultural and ritual roles — and the colonial imposition of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (1861), which criminalised 'unnatural offences' based on Victorian British morality, later reclaimed and repealed through sustained activist and legal struggle culminating in the Supreme Court's 2018 Navtej Singh Johar judgment invoking constitutional morality and transformative constitutionalism.

The NALSA v. Union of India judgment (2014) legally recognised a third gender category and affirmed transgender persons' right to self-identified gender, a landmark that scholars have analysed both as a significant rights victory and as raising complex questions about how legal recognition interacts with existing, historically rooted hijra community structures and their own internal systems of identity and kinship (such as the guru-chela discipleship system), which do not map neatly onto Western LGBTQ+ categories.

Contemporary Indian cultural studies increasingly examines the intersection of gender with digital media, documenting both the mobilising potential of online feminist campaigns such as the Indian iteration of #MeToo (2018), which named prominent figures across media, academia, and the arts, and the simultaneous rise of coordinated online gender-based harassment, illustrating that digital publics have become a crucial and contested new terrain for gender and sexuality politics in India.