A rich and theoretically nuanced ethnography of non-metropolitan “vernacular” queer/trans categories in relation to dominant LGBT representation in India, Dutta's long-awaited book pushes the envelope of queer/trans studies in India and beyond by highlighting and problematizing recursive hierarchies of language and scale, legibility and legitimacy produced in their wake.

Gayatri Reddy, University of Illinois Chicago, USA

Aniruddha Dutta's book based on several years of painstaking fieldwork is a theoretically strong and empirically rich work analysing non elite and non-metropolitan LGBT communities and identities in India. It excellently provides a critical counter narrative to the globalising discourse around queer identities and rights in neoliberal India.

Rohit K. Dasgupta, London School of Economics & Political Science, UK

A paradigm-shifting, timely, and long overdue study. Recasting the analytical purchase of vernacularization, Dutta issues a major intervention in debates around scalar, linguistic, and epistemic hierarchies. By bridging vertical and horizontal traffics of transness, Globalizing through the Vernacular refutes a romanticized idea of cultural authenticity as much as the unidirectional burden of globalization. This book, replete with compelling ethnographic insights, constitutes a major blow to (queer) theory's stubborn unwillingness to register the power of geopolitical fault lines.

Howard Chiang, author of Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific

Engaging linguistic, transnational feminist, and gender studies frames, Dutta realigns “vernacularization” and forces us to rethink the term as well as the hierarchies, linguistic and social, that the term signifies. This is the first time that a text has so thoroughly mapped the tensions between elite, dominant, class-based discourses onto the rawness of lived experiences of non-elite expressions of sexuality, identity, and sexual politics. Dutta's writing takes us on a journey of true understanding of the complexity of the way politics of sexuality works in India. Using the frame of venacularization, Dutta shows ways in which voices and discourses of non-dominant LGBTQIA communities are muffled and, in this process, also shows how these communities offer pushback. This is a truly thrilling text.

Ila Nagar, The Ohio State University, USA

Globalizing through the Vernacular is a fascinating, deeply nuanced investigation of how gender minority communities across urban and rural India navigate the tensions between local experience, national political representation, and transnational funding streams as they fight for health, safety, and justice. Drawing on nearly 15 years of community-embedded fieldwork, Aniruddha Dutta offers an unprecedented view into quotidian life among hijras, kothis, and dhuranis, and a rich portrait of how the everyday has transformed since the global emergence of transgender rights. Globalizing through the Vernacular is a much-need contribution to the field of transgender studies that establishes Dutta as one of the field's most insightful thinkers.

TJ Billard, Northwestern University, USA

Globalizing through the vernacular is essential reading for anyone seeking to re-understand gender and sexual variance beyond the urban LGBTQ identities in India today. Theoretically informed and empirically rich, this book is an indispensable addition to the growing body of critical scholarship on gender and sexual diversity in India and beyond.

Adnan Hossain, University of Glasgow, UK