Queer Fashion and Masculinities in India

This book examines how visual aesthetic practices shape queer masculinities in contemporary India, addressing an underexamined area of scholarship on contemporary Indian queer fashion. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and more than 40 color photographs, it investigates how kothi and other gender-nonconforming communities, masculine-presenting panthi men, and emerging elite “neo-royal” queer figures use clothing, styling, and image-making to negotiate gender, sexuality, caste, class, and social belonging. The book argues that queer fashion practices are rooted in specific regional histories and cultural contexts while simultaneously engaging with national and global fashion discourses. Through four commissioned photo series from Hyderabad, Kolkata, New Delhi, and Mumbai, it explores how queer communities navigate visibility, safety, intimacy, aspiration, and recognition through dress and gender performance. Methodologically, this study advances patchwork ethnography by conceptualizing fashion and self-fashioning as collaborative research practices that combine photography, sensory experience, ethnographic engagement, and critical interpretation. By positioning fashion, photography, and curatorial practice as sites of resistance, care, and knowledge production, the book offers a decolonial and interdisciplinary contribution to fashion studies, visual culture, anthropology, and gender studies. This demonstrates how queer embodiment functions as a mode of cultural negotiation, generating alternative masculinities and social identities while contesting the unequal structures of recognition, citizenship, dignity and public presence in modern India. ISBN1350584029, 9781350584020

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