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Seeing the State with Transgender People: Gender, Caste, and Neoliberal Development in Kerala, India Shilpa Menon (24400145) anthropology of the state gender and sexuality studies India studies This dissertation examines the entanglements of transgender identity and state power in contemporary Kerala, a southwestern state of India. It asks what trans-queer people can tell us about the changing shape of postcolonial developmentalist governance and the welfare state in the late-capitalist era. In the past decade, Indian LGBTQIA+ politics has seen a distinct, if ambivalent, shift towards reckoning with neoliberal governance, leaving the national LGBTQ+ movement in a state of stagnation or active co-optation by establishment politics. Through the case of Kerala, I argue that turning to India’s distinct subnational regions can reveal alternative genealogies of queer, anti-caste, and feminist politics in India that have been elided by nation-centric framings. In 2015, Kerala became the first Indian state to release a policy recognizing transgender people, reifying its transnational image as a “model” of people-centric Third World development. Since then, transgender Keralites have been fashioned as mascots of development within Kerala’s subnationalist political field by a range of players—political parties, social movements, and state- and state-allied agencies. Through 24 months of ethnographic field work across 2018-22, this dissertation follows trans-queer Keralites as they navigate the heightened contradictions of a particular historical moment: as newly recognized gendered subjects within a Left-led subnational state apparatus, in a country with a Hindu Right-wing party at the helm, within a late neoliberal juncture where welfare is being shaped as a site for expanded governance and the purchase of political legitimacy rather than redistribution. The dissertation presents the framing of “anti-caste materialist feminism” to think along with queer-trans Keralites at this juncture. Rather than relying on presumed solidarity based on identity, such a materialist vision is built by people whose lives are variously curtailed by capitalism/power collectively theorizing about their lives. While the state and civil society tend to insulate transgender subjects through recognition, the dissertation shows that trans-queer people’s politics and lives are built fundamentally on historical-material relationships—between transgender people, same-sex loving people, sex workers, impoverished cis women, oppressor-caste cis women, and Dalit-Bahujan (oppressed-caste and religious) communities. 2026-05-01T00:00:00Z Text Thesis 10.25417/uic.32995202.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/thesis/Seeing_the_State_with_Transgender_People_Gender_Caste_and_Neoliberal_Development_in_Kerala_India/32995202 In Copyright Open Access after 2028-05-01