Vinita Chaudhry

VINITA (V) CHAUDRY, then a graduate student at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, received a grant in April 2017 to aid research on “The Price of Transgender Justice: Funding, Advocacy, and Racial Politics in Philadelphia, PA,” supervised by Dr. Shalini Shankar. “Transgender” as a category has received widespread media attention due not only to unprecedented moments of public visibility, but also inequalities with regard to legislation, health, and violence. Across the United States, nonprofit organizations are looking to serve marginalized transgender communities; they often do so, however, with inconsistent, racialized, and classed understandings of what “transgender” signifies, particularly to gender nonconforming communities of color, who experience multiple forms of economic and social marginalization. This project examines negotiations and interactions among funders, advocates, social service providers, and gender nonconforming people of color in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which boasts a rich history of transgender community building. Using ethnographic methods drawn from linguistic and cultural anthropology, including participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis with these actors in Philadelphia, the project will document the varying institutional uses of “transgender” and the moralized scripts that funders, advocates, and gender nonconforming people develop in order to achieve funding-related goals. In the production of these scripts and negotiations focused on gendered and racialized communities, they redefine and reshape broader meanings of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Through ethnographic investigation, this project will offer on-the-ground perspectives on the institutional production of “transgender” as an economically, materially, and socially pertinent category.