Vaishnavi Sundar

Savage Minds

Vaishnavi Sundar, a writer and self-taught filmmaker from Chennai, discusses her film Dysphoric (2021) that explores the social, medical, and institutional constructions of “gender identity” and her forthcoming film Behind The Looking Glass (2023) that gives voice to the women who's partners “transition.” Analysing the influence of western theories within India in recent decades, Sundar addresses how the theories of “gender identity” have come to infect academia, NGOs, the fields of psychology and human rights advocacy, and even the very groups most affected by this narrative and its medical procedures, the Dalits (those born into India’s most marginalised castes). While Dalits have faced enormous violence and oppression on the subcontinent for thousands of years, Sundar notes that it is precisey this groups which has become the target for “gender identity” in the transitioning of India’s most oppressed who view “queerness” and “transgender identity” as an escape route from historical economical, political and social oppression. Where “transgender” ideology has taken hold of the more socially affluent in the west, Sundar notes that in India many Dalit women captured by the “gender identity” myth view this narrative as a panacea, an escape from the brutal reality of being female and impoverished in India today.

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