Sharanraj Krishnan discusses how his engagement with the Queer Medical Humanities PhD School prompted him to ‘re-enter’ the ‘field’ and reexamine the positionality of the “I” within his research.
Introduction: Queer Medical Humanities (QMH)
QMH is an emerging transdisciplinary field at the intersection of critical medical humanities and queer studies, which applies insights from the humanities and social sciences to real-world challenges in health and medicine. Rooted in queer theoretical legacies, employing arts-based approaches, and collaborating across natural and social sciences, the scope of QMH as an interdisciplinary practice traverses through English and comparative literature, history, cultural and media studies, anthropology, and sociology to interrogate queer experiences of illness, medicine, and technoscience.
Thanks to the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities at Durham University, I had the opportunity to attend the Queer Methodologies in Medical Humanities PhD School. Over three days, the program opened conceptual frameworks in trans/queer, and feminist thought, offering expansive ways to engage with health, illness, and well-being. Through masterclasses, creative workshops, film screening and reading group discussions, the PhD School prompted me to ‘re-enter’ the ‘field’ and reexamine the positionality of the “I” within my research. Our explorations went beyond activism as research practice and arts-based approaches. We also engaged with moving image, health, and illness, the challenges of working with sensitive historical archives, the ethics of researching marginalised communities, and research methods emphasising lived experience, power, and social context.
”What’s in a Name?” is an attempt to explore my positionality as a queer health researcher by reclaiming films, urban motifs, Mumbai streets, and shifting identities; made during a zine-making workshop organised by Nazariya collective and Therapist Moon in Delhi. The prompt was to explore what queerness means and feels to me using shapes, texture, sounds, colours, and other sensory elements.
At the QMH PhD school, hands-on activities involving arts-based and creative research methodologies (to name a few, film screenings, group discussions, and especially the zine-making workshop) improved my grasp of the method. Within the scope of my work, zines have been used to challenge dominant clinical discourses in that they hold promise not only as a data collection tool but also as way of teaching and archiving personal stories. Queering the very form of research, zines bring forward counter-narratives and voices that are usually ignored while simultaneously preserving moments that would otherwise be lost in formal reports.
Benjamin Dalton and Chase Ledin’s workshop on “Queering the Clinic” led me to realise that simple materials (like markers, paper, and collective imagination) can open new paths at the intersection of queer studies, clinical science, public health, and medical anthropology. Recent work confirms this promise, showing how arts-based approaches reveal insights that surveys or interviews alone often miss (Biagioli et al., 2021; Damon et al., 2022; Valli, 2021).
Queering the Clinic: Bringing the field back to the self
After six years of doctoral research and fieldwork, I approached the PhD School with the question: how might this experience impact the way I do my work? In this piece, I reflect on how the PhD School’s workshops and exercises influenced my approach to public health research in India, especially in terms of queer methodologies, positionalities, and the relevance of arts-based methods such as zine-making.
This experience didn’t just give me new tools; it shifted how I saw myself in relation to my work, anchored in the intersections of activism, structural violence, and embodied narratives. I began to reflect on how my neurodivergent and asexual identity are not just personal attributes but shape how I perform research and ask questions. I also found myself reeling from a loss during fieldwork: the murder of a transgender activist. Grief entered the research, not just as a footnote, but as a method. And I began to look at clinics differently, examining hospitals as sites of historical and structural violence, and spaces charged with caste, care, and absence. These may seem like disparate threads, but for me, drawing explicit links between these reflections and the zine-making workshop, activist interactions, and discussions of ethics of care and ‘imagination of queer clinics’ is where the personal and political come rushing together.
My PhD project engages QMH by exploring how illness narratives, health inequities and bodily experiences intersect with the lives of sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) in India. Rather than conforming to rigid disciplinary norms it challenges the normative healthcare frameworks. While calling for more inclusive and empathetic care approaches the research embraces using unconventional modes of storytelling by reimagining queer spaces within the existing public health framework. In the context of growing privatisation, degradation of public institutions and weakening of public health infrastructure in India, this piece asks: what does it mean to queer the clinic in India today?
Activist Grief and Queer Necro-politics
My positionality as a Tamil-speaking privileged caste from Kerala, middle class, aromantic-asexual, neurodivergent, cisgender man raised in Mumbai’s suburbs deeply informs my approach to queer health research. I had to relocate between Delhi-Mumbai for this study and immerse myself in the everyday lives of queer communities in Bhiwandi. The process was a reckoning with space, selfhood, allyship, activism and belonging. The QMH PhD school supported this inquiry by prompting a critical question in me: what is ‘queer’ in ‘queer methodologies?’
The stories that I encountered from SGMs in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra—an industrial town populated with working class immigrants, and religious minorities—reflect the increasing neglect, apathy, incompetency, and failure of the Indian state’s responsibility to its people. A particular field encounter that continues to haunt me is the murder of Kareena (name changed to protect her identity), a prominent transgender social activist and field informant from Bhiwandi. Killed by her boyfriend in a brutal act of intimate partner violence, her death was captured on CCTV, and a police investigation followed.
The community described this as one incident among many, indicating pervasive gendered violence faced by transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) individuals in Bhiwandi. Kareena had shared stories with me of how public healthcare providers refused to perform medico-legal examination of transgender rape victims, forcing her into protracted advocacy. Despite state inaction, she along with her peers provided community-driven initiatives like transgender certificates, basic material amenities and temporary shelter for TGNC individuals who left or were forced out of their natal families.
From the structural neglect of the HIV/AIDS crisis to the more recent lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an evident impetus in sexual migration, displaced marginalised identities—escaping familial abuse and relocating for transition—rising right-wing religious extremism, growing subjugation of religious minorities, and police-state control on bodies and sexual activity through surveillance, legal restrictions, and discriminatory enforcement.
Kareena’s death exemplifies how bodies are governed not only through life but even in death—what Achille Mbembe calls “queer necro-politics.” Under conditions of economic precarity, carceral policing, and abandonment, transgender lives are reduced to bare life (Mbembe, 2020). Local transgendercollectives struggle to claim citizenship. The processes of demanding their identity rights often exist within “death-worlds,” where the promise of inclusion remains murderous.
Kareena’s murder is a reminder of the brutality of everyday violence by modern states and institutions in this creation of “death-worlds.” TGNC individuals are often denied access to healthcare. This happens due to lack of proper documentation or outright refusal by healthcare providers. They are excluded from social protection schemes such as transgender pensions, housing support, and employment programs. These patterns of exclusion are well-documented in existing literature and help explaining the high rates of premature death within TGNC communities. These instances indicate that failure of state policies, over policing, and economic marginalisation are central to how biopower (state control over individual bodies) operates in that these pathways remain exclusionary in nature and antithetical to social justice struggles (Dean Spade, 2015; Haritaworn et al., 2014; Jasbir K Paur, 2017).
Crafting Zines: Re-Imagining the Clinic
At the PhD school, the film screening and subsequent zine making activity invited us to imagine the clinic as a space of feeling, memory, and refusal. The film Orlando: My Political Biographyby Paul B. Preciado helped me revisit the hospital as a site of historical violence. I recalled accompanying Ray (name changed to protect their identity), a transmasculine nonbinary friend from Thane, to Guwahati for gender-affirming surgery.
Ray’s “Autistic Joy” zine celebrating sensory pleasures and emotional landscapes of trans autistic experience. Used here with Ray’s permission.
As his caregiver, we discussed, our observations, and experiences during our time at the hospital at length. We spoke about “corridor conversations” that nurses were having at the nurse station—reminiscent of a scene from the film, with protagonists waiting outside a clinic. There was an instance of confusion and misgendering regarding the purpose of the surgery by the hospital staff, which only offered strict binary documentation (male/female options). Ray remarked that such incidences are everyday occurrence for SGMs, as they are subjected to insensitivity, censorship, and regulation in public spaces and mainstream imagination.
Ray is a primary school teacher and activist who hopes to create affirming safe spaces for self-expression and empowering platforms so that young community members do not have to go through the same hurdles and struggles, he did. He emphasises the inclusion of marginalised identities within LGBT+ community spaces as well as medical institutions. Historically, upper-caste groups dominate medical professions and lower caste individuals are often relegated to roles considered “menial” within healthcare, such as sanitation, nursing, and auxiliary services, reinforcing caste-based labour divisions. Through his zine-making practice, Ray turns to art-based queer activism to centre neurodivergent voices within the trans/queer community.
Conclusion
Through my research on how caste, class, disabilities, religion, migration, and transition status shape exclusion among SGMs, the QMH PhD School helped me to rethink what counts as the “field.” It deepened my understanding of positionality and power structures, encouraging me to centre community-led knowledge in framing ‘Queering the Indian clinic.’ Drawing from Nagington’s framework for ethics of queer care, queering the Indian clinic would demand a fundamental restructuring of healthcare beyond inclusion policies by dissolving professional gatekeeping that reduces patients to passive recipients.
It is necessary to challenge the logic of marketised care, dismantle hierarchical/exclusionary structures, redistribute power, and advocate for solidarity-based, non-discriminatory models of health that are reflexive, accessible, and collectively held. Inspired by the Care Collective’s concept of promiscuous care, this approach transcends transactional service delivery, as it is a structural critique of caste, gender and sexuality shaping diagnosis, treatment pathways and health accessibility. Queer clinics reinvent sites of inclusive care as radical, reciprocal, political, and inherently transformative healthcare spaces (Nagington, 2023). The Indian public health system enforces conformity and systemic exclusion of SGMs, but QMH provides the necessary tools for resistance.
About the author
Sharanraj Krishnan (he/him) is a trained physiotherapist, public health professional, and researcher working at the intersections of queer health, public policy, and activist scholarship in India. Having over a decade of experience across clinical medicine, health systems research, and community care, his ethnographic work brings a multi-layered lens to public health practice, queer bioethics and reimagining inclusive healthcare futures.
References
Biagioli, M., Pässilä, A., & Owens, A. (2021). The zine method as a form of qualitative analysis. In Beyond Text: Learning through Arts-Based Research (pp. 171–185). https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/9781789383553_9
Damon, L., Kiconco, G., Atukunda, C., & Pahl, K. (2022). Queering the Form: Zine-Making as Disruptive Practice. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 22(4), 407–419. https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086221087652
Dean Spade. (2015). Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the limits of law. Duke University Press. https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GYgwCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT13&dq=Spade,+D.+2011.+Normal+life:+Administrative+Violence,+Critical+Trans+Politics,+and+the+Limits+of+Law.+Brooklyn,+New+York:+South+End+Press.&ots=0esyWtlJyx&sig=406BltM9QWOgn9bubxeY5HPIBQs#v=onepage&q&f=false
Haritaworn, J., Kuntsman, A., & Posocco, S. (2014). Queer Necropolitics. Routledge.
Jasbir K Paur. (2017). Terrorist Assemblages- Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press.
Mbembe, A. (2020). Necropolitics. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478007227
Nagington, M. (2023). What can queers teach us about nursing ethics? In Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Nursing (pp. 404–414). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003427407-45
Valli, C. (2021). Participatory dissemination: bridging in-depth interviews, participation, and creative visual methods through Interview-Based Zine-Making (IBZM). In Fennia (Vol. 199, Issue 1, pp. 25–45). Geographical Society of Finland. https://doi.org/10.11143/FENNIA.99197
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