Critiquing Indian Middle‐Class Principles of Mobility: Examining Transgender Representation in Post‐Millennial OTT Media in India

This literature review critically examines the need to incorporate critiques of urban, middle‐class, Hindu, upper‐caste mediated regulation of transgender mobility within media analyses of transgender representation in contemporary films and other streaming (OTT) media in India. The essay explores how the real and imagined/narrative mobility of marginalized groups, such as Dalit women, Muslim women, sex workers, and transgender communities, has been historically disciplined by the cultural and political practices of the upper‐caste Hindu middle class family. Material‐discursive practices of this class upper‐caste, middle‐class Hindu family shape and get shaped by gendered and caste‐coded interests of neoliberal productivity and heteropatriarchal respectability, determining the ideal geographies of the city and the relational cartographies of the nation. Films and media also get influenced by and shape these discursive practices by prioritizing a middle‐class sense of place in their worldmaking efforts. The narrative schema of such cultural production designs the movement of characters in such a way that they move in directions considered recognizable, legible and acceptable for the Indian middle class family. The primary aim of this review is to delineate the literature on spatial imaginaries of the middle class family and how the cultural practices of this class imagine and render legible the marginalized, allowing for a critical analysis of the co‐production of middle‐class spatial control and transgender visibility in cultural texts like that of contemporary streaming media. Furthermore, this study explores the emplacement of the marginalized as evident in critiques of representations of Dalit, Muslim, and sex worker communities in Indian cinema, emphasizing the necessity of applying similar analyses to trans representation. This spatially sensitive critique is crucial for understanding transgender struggles in India, highlighting the importance of examining middle‐class spatial imaginaries that shape trans representation and the politics of regulated transgender (im)mobilities.