Regional ontologies and new gender technologies in urban Punjab

This article examines how gender-nonconforming muratan navigate the rapidly growing access to new gender technologies in the city of Chandigarh. The burgeoning of options for gender-affirming procedures can in part be attributed to the passing of a spate of legislation pertaining to trans rights in the last decade. However, state discourse and policies insist on a linear temporality of transition with coherence between gender and physiology as its goal. Eschewing this reductive biologism, muratan draw from enduring emic ontologies of the body to manage expectations about and evaluate the efficacy of biomedical procedures. Emergent modes of augmentation are being absorbed into a continuum of practices of self-alteration that have a longer history in the region. These aesthetic practices congeal largely around ideals of beauty embodied by Pakistani muratan, pointing to the centrality of transregional exchange in the making of identity. Going beyond the partitions created by state cartographies and categories, muratan are actively establishing the very coordinates of successful biomedical transition.