Brown/Trans/Les

"Talia Bhatt's Trans/Rad/Fem is like a shot of ice-cold aqvavit and a roundhouse slap to the face. Read it." - Sandy Stone, foundational scholar of the field of Transgender Studies

How does one articulate a cohesive 'feminism' in a culture whose most-spoken language lacks a word for 'misogyny'?

In Trans/Rad/Fem, radical transfeminist Talia Bhatt attempted to provide a thorough, materialist framework for understanding the oppression of trans women particularly and all queer people generally as a facet of patriarchal misogyny.  A key facet of that oppression is epistemicide, the totalizing erasure of knowledge, language, and history in order to prevent the marginalized from so much as being able to conceptualize, let alone articulate, the terms of their oppression.

Transmisogyny is far from the only force that is animated by epistemic injustice, however. Few cultures illustrate the truth of that assertion better than the land of Bhatt's birth, a nation dogged by internal contradictions and fractious violence along the lines of caste, class, religion, nationality, and more, before even considering the matter of sex.

In this text, Bhatt attempts to reckon with the sheer scale and magnitude of the challenge that her motherland poses, and asks: is it even possible to articulate something akin to "desi feminism" or "Third World Feminism" without flattening, homogenizing, and simplifying the ills of a land ravaged by forces as disparate as colonialism, communal violence, and homegrown theocratic fascism? The answer, she hopes, is "yes".