Visiting Research Fellow, August - October 2021
Dr Bulbul Gupta is presently Assistant Professor in the Department of English at M.M. Postgraduate College at Modinagar, district Ghaziabad. Her fields of interest are gender studies, Victorian literature, Indian writing in English, phonetics and communication skills. Her doctorate examined the role of women in the plays of Oscar Wilde and she has published on Oscar Wilde in international journal The Wildean. She is the recipient of a 2019 Associateship at the Inter-University Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla. She has developed MOOC modules on Indian writing in English in collaboration with English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Dr Gupta has presented her research on gender studies in national and international conferences including in Oxford, UK, and at Toronto, Canada. She was also awarded the Professor K. Subramanian Endowment Prize for securing highest CGPA in postgraduate diploma in teaching of English at English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.
Project Title: Transgender worlds and human dignity
Human dignity has been credited with being the main philosophical foundation of human rights by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of the United Nations and several other documents. It increasingly occupies a prominent place in various discourses, be they legal, political or ethical. It is a significant component of an individual’s identity and underlines the uniqueness of human beings amongst all other creatures. It is a concept with a long history that has been understood as a distinctive social standing elevated above others and generally associated with one’s office, caste or class.
The project aims to explore the question of human dignity of transgendered people who confront brutal attacks on their worth or value (and thus identity) frequently and in varied ways, such as sexual violence, psychological, physical and emotional torture, social exclusion, and poverty, to name a few. The project examines the issue of dignity of trans people vis-à-vis the trans protagonists of autobiographies of some of the popular transgender people of India namely, A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi by Manobi Bandyopadhyay, Me Hijra, Me Laxmi by Laxminarayan Tripathi, and The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story by A. Revathi. The aspect of dignity of trans protagonists in the above mentioned autobiographies is explored in context of the theories of dignity given by philosophers Immanuel Kant, Max Scheler and Martha Nussbaum.
The project aims to identify the different forms and practices of dignity violations of trans people in the aforesaid autobiographies and the effects of such degradation, humiliation and dehumanization on them. Further the project explores questions such as the ways by which human dignity is attributed to trans people; is dignity of trans people independent or unconditional that is, without having any reference to their sexual orientation; are transgender people treated as an end or as a means to some ends; is dignity for trans people a matter of inner absolute worth or value grounded in rationality and freedom as per the theory of dignity of Kant or is it given in a unique manner to an individual (a trans person) as laid down by Scheler in his theory of human dignity; what are the special contents of trans persons’ experience that is, what he wills, feels, thinks, etc. that entitles them to unique or individual-personal dignity? The project also investigates the issue of dignity of trans protagonists of the selected autobiographies in the light of the Capability Theory of justice and concept of human dignity and a list of the fundamental Human Capabilities given by Martha Nussbaum.
The endeavour is to find an answer to the very crucial question of determinants of dignity of a trans person and to probe if dignity, for trans protagonists is a matter of external endowment or a verdict passed by family and society or is it internal strength that defies outer hindrances; whether it is an individual or a collective concern; are trans people able to rise over and above dignity violations themselves or do they remain helpless victims; or do they need the existence or enforcement of laws by the government to safeguard their dignity?