Performing Thirunangai: Activism, Development, and Normative Citizenship in Tamil Transgender Performances

This dissertation examines how Thirunangais - members of Tamil Nadu's largest transgender population - use performance art to strengthen their social movement and, more broadly, redefine expectations of normative citizenship. In the past decade, Thirunangai activism has evolved from demands for basic rights and legal recognitions to more nuanced efforts at crafting a political and socioeconomic presence in contemporary Tamil Nadu. In the process, performance has been a primary vehicle through which community leaders articulate varied, sometimes competing visions of Thirunangai advancement. By exploring Thirunangai-generated performed representations in dance venues, filmed interviews, autobiographical films, and a popular transgender beauty pageant, this ethnographic study positions performance art as more than a tool of mobilization or a means of publicly negotiating local and global regimes of normativity. Instead, the dissertation examines the potentiality of performance as an embodied epistemology, capable of accumulating, storing, and transferring knowledge about Thirunangai politics, identity, and varied aspirations of socioeconomic development.