Putting the Trans in Transnational: How Young Queer Indian Americans’ Political Identities are Impacted by their Parents’ Domestic Indian Affiliations
Within South Asian communities, particularly among Indian Americans, questions of gender, sexuality, diaspora, religion, family obligation, and cultural belonging intersect in uniquely complex and understudied ways. While scholarship exists on South Asian queer migrant adults, much less research has examined younger generations, especially Gen Z and Millennial queer Indian Americans, whose social worlds are shaped not only by migration histories and traditional family structures but also by online queer communities, shifting U.S. racial politics, transnational media flows, and evolving discourses around mental health and intersectionality. This proposal seeks to address this gap by examining how queer Gen Z and Millennial Indian Americans navigate identity, belonging, and cultural expectations across U.S. and Indian cultural contexts. Via semi-structured interviews, it seeks to understand how younger queer South Asians construct meaning around queerness and Indianness simultaneously and how they navigate intergenerational cultural pressures.