Abstract
In a country such as India where the vast majority of adults live with their parents and other close kin for most of their lives, the role of biological kin and the natal home as constitutive of queer life and identity cannot be overstated, especially for individuals assigned female at birth who face structural and interpersonal norms that define them as future wives and mothers. My work asks: how do unmarried queer and trans individuals slotted and socialized as daughters form and assert themselves as masculine members of their natal families, and what does this reveal about gender, kinship, and normativity in North India? This work draws upon eleven months of core ethnographic fieldwork conducted across North India in Lucknow, capital of the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh; Dehradun, capital of Uttarakhand; and New Delhi, the country’s capital; and focuses on twenty core queer and trans individuals aged 21–38, as well as some of their mothers. This research finds that these individuals, whom I refer to as “masculine daughters,” co-constitute their nonnormative identities through their relations with natal kin and assert culturally inflected North Indian masculine aesthetics and practices – with natal kin, in public space, and within broader webs of LGBTQ+ sociality. By establishing daily labor-related, financial, and emotional interdependence with natal kin, especially mothers, unmarried masculine daughters secure son-like emotional and material belonging while simultaneously reinforcing normative ideals of South Asian gender, kinship, and masculinities. This work contributes to South Asian kinship studies and LGBTQ+ scholarship by centering queer transmasculine subject formation in North India, expanding conversations on queer futurity, intergenerational relationality, and belonging.