Towards a Sociology of Gender Diversity: The Indian and UK Cases

Western transgender (trans) and intersex scholarly engagement with poststructuralism has mushroomed in recent years, including accounts by Feinberg (1996, 1998), Bornstein (1994, 1998), Whittle (2002) and Stryker and Whittle (2006). More recently, Western feminists and sociologists who draw on poststructuralism, such as Monro (2000, 2005, 2007a, 2007b), Hird (2000, 2002, 2006), Hines (2006, 2007), and Sanger (2008) have begun to explore the implications of affirmative trans and intersex identities for gender theory. There is recognition amongst these authors that poststructuralist accounts, whilst crucial to theorising gender diversity, require framing in such a way as to be mindful of the social, material, and corporeal formation of gendered experiences. These approaches are arguably sociological in that they address the structuring of human experience within both public and private realms, as opposed to, for instance, the focus on the discursive construction of social life favoured by cultural studies. Structural approaches fi t well with broader developments within the fi eld of gender and women’s studies, in particular those associated with intersectionality, in which the mutually constitutive nature of social characteristics is interrogated. Recent trends within the field of intersectionality point to a need for attention to structural inequalities and power relations (Grabham et al. 2009).