Experience of Exclusion: Tamil Cinema and Male to Female Transgender Community
The Male to Female (MtF) Transgender community emerges as the most visible queer culture in India. Cinema provides viewers the ideologies and beliefs sensationally through celebrities and distorts reality. The primary objective of this study is to describe the role of Tamil Cinema on Social exclusion of MtF Transgender community of Tamil Nadu. The study based on the face to face survey analysis of 416 MtF Transgender individuals of Tamil Nadu. The study shows that Transgender people are significantly excluded from family and forced to drop out from school and largely involve in sex work and begging for living because of their transgender identity. The perception of the Transgender community clearly describes that Tamil Cinema negatively propagates and maintains the dominant ideology about Transgender people in society. The control of communication mutes the Transgender community and the unequal power relationship drives them to the multidimensional social exclusion in Tamil Nadu.