Trans imaging of non-normative homes: the critical geographies of higher education- LGBTQ+ student housing in Delhi and Mumbai, India

“Student housing” rarely discursively figures in the contemporary urban Indian public imagination because of a deeply rooted cis-heteronormative conflation of marriage, housing, and permanence. This dissertation considers what it means for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer (LGBTQ+) postsecondary students to belong in an everyday trans-/homonegative society. Through empirical case studies of on- and off-campus geographies of student housing at North Campus, DU, Delhi and Deonar Campus, TISS, Mumbai, I analyse and visualize the invisibilized lived experiences of Higher Education (HE)-LGBTQ+ students in two of India’s megacities. These two campuses are home to radical student-led gender-based housing activism against the patriarchal and cisnormative codes of student accommodations. Gender, however, cannot be activated in isolation, as it intersects with a range of identity axes such as class, caste, region, religion, and (rarely specified) sexuality. This dissertation is based on two phases of research (August 2020 to April 2021 and June 2022 to October 2022) conducted virtually during the Covid-19 global pandemic. In-depth interactive spatial storytelling with 23 HE-LGBTQ+ students was combined with semi-structured interviews with 12 student housing stakeholders (3 urban planners, 5 brokers, and 4 landowners) and autoethnography. My transdisciplinary training as a geographer-artist-architect was used to develop a “trans imaging” technique to see-through and spatio-visually represent how cis-heteropatriarchy codes normative domestic blueprints in ways that enable queer domicide. I argue that queer-domicidal blueprints exceed the spatial scale of marital family homes shaping student spatialities at university-city edges and student housing and homes in India. This dissertation advocates for unfollowing normative domestic blueprints and learning from HE-LGBTQ+ students’ (un)homings and reimaginings of non-normative home-futures.