Sexually Liminal Lives

Sexually Liminal Lives follows the intimate, domestic, and working lives of the Chiyawali kotis, and of the wives (niharins), lovers (giriyas), and kin who sustain them. For the Chiyawali kotis, it is not a stopover on the way to coming out but a space they actively navigate to build kinship, access welfare, and secure life chances. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Eastern India, this book reconceptualises the closet in South Asia, and develops an account of sexual liminality, treating liminality not as a failure to arrive at a stable identity but as a calculated way of living. It engages with queer theory, the anthropology of kinship, postcolonial and South Asian studies simultaneously, reframing debates and discourse on queer sexual citizenship in the Global South.