Learning to be Legible

Anshu Jain

Learning to Be Legible examines how transmen in Hindi-speaking regions of India learn to be legible as transmen, as transgender, and as men, in relation to themselves and the state in particular—specifically in and through spaces like digital community networks, local government offices, workplaces, and natal families. The book explores the gap between legislative definitions of 'transgender' and cultural meaning-making, which renders transmen illegible, and subjects them to legal and social precarity. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in three cities, including life-history interviews and participant observations in activist, educational, bureaucratic, and community spaces, the book centers transmen's phenomenological experiences of illegibility and precarity. It reveals the complex ways in which law and gender categories materially and affectively impact individuals who consequently learn to negotiate and inhabit them. These processes are conceptualised as socio-cultural learning, and through this the research theorises 'becoming' as an ongoing, situated, and relational identity-in-practice. This work contributes to educational theorising via interdisciplinary engagements with anthropology, transgender studies, and queer studies, analyzing everyday politics of legibility, language-access and counter-hegemonic learnings and knowledge production that exist outside formal institutions in marginalised socialities not yet considered through this lens.

About Anshu Jain

Anshu Jain is an ethnographer whose multidisciplinary research traces the textures of daily life and learning that emerge as hitherto illegible groups and peoples attempt to make a livable life for themselves in Hindi-speaking regions of northern India. With a focus on non-metropolitan regions, his work examines the inequalities and the material and affective landscapes produced by law, gender categories, medical and communication technologies, and civil society organisations and NGOs in the course of efforts by community members to transform social, educational, and bureaucratic logics and practices that govern their lives. His dissertation research was funded by the Graduate Training Program Award (School of Education, UW-Madison), Dissertation Fellowship in LGBTQ+ Studies (Department of Gender and Women's Studies, UW-Madison), and NAEd/Spencer Dissertation Fellowship. Anshu is currently completing his doctoral studies at the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he will serve as a postdoctoral fellow during the 2026–27 academic year. He holds master's degrees in Gender and Women's Studies from UW–Madison and in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics. Having grown up in a non-metropolitan city in northern India, his sustained interest in the possibilities, limitations, and discursive meaning-making processes that structure the everyday in small cities animates much of his work. As a teacher, scholar, activist, and writer, Anshu's goal is to work towards expanding educational rights, policies, and practices in India.