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    Photographing A Year In India's Queer "Kothi" Community

    Photographer Candace Feit has spent the last year documenting the lives of a community of people who call themselves "Kothi" in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

    The term "Kothi" describes a wide swath of identities and relationships, including "married fathers who have male lovers, people born male who wear female dress and male-born people who wear traditional women's clothing only during religious festivals or celebrations" says photographer Candace Feit.

    "In December 2013, the judges of India's highest court overturned a 2009 lower court decision that decriminalized gay sex between consenting adults. While convictions on the law have been rare – none in the last 20 years - the law has been used to harass sexual minorities, particularly transgender people.The ruling underscores a longstanding tension in Indian society between western-style laws, inherited from British colonizers, and traditional practices that have allowed gay and transgender communities across to negotiate a panoply of sexual and gender identities within the confines of traditional values."

    "Some Khoti are quietly battling with their families about the expectation that they will soon marry and have children, while others are completely estranged from their families as a result of their gender identity expression. They all take what they describe as the female role in sex and give one another female names, by which they address one another.

    In the places where they gather together - in their temples during religious celebrations, or in certain kothi's homes - they create their own spaces to express their gender and sexuality. They do this through the theatre of religious festivals and the assuming of traditional gender roles. For example by gathering together to do what they call "women's work:" chopping down wood and preparing and serving food together and practicing traditional Indian dance. This juxtaposition between reality and make-believe creates space for them to be the women they feel themselves to be."

    "Yet even as traditional culture allows small spaces for Kothis, they are inevitably forced to be outsiders – something that the debate over the ruling re-criminalizing homosexual sex brings into sharp focus."

    Feit plans on returning to India in April to continue documenting the "Khoti" community. You can learn more about her work and purchase prints of her photographs here.