“We were together and we had our own family in each other”: refusing repatriation and forging gendered belonging as Hijra refugees in Kolkata
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Kothi, and Hijra (LGBTQKH*) refugees in South Asia have long reimagined the meaning of refugeehood and belonging. This paper explores the case of Hijra Bengali refugees following the 1971 Bangladeshi independence war, focusing on their crafting of belonging from below. Despite international pressures for repatriation and organized abandonment, some Hijra refugees chose to remain in Kolkata’s red-light areas, seeking safety, livelihoods, and community through precolonial ties. This study examines Hijra refusal to return to Bangladesh and their subsequent involvement in the Kolkata sex worker movement, highlighting their everyday decision-making, cultural practices, and gendered community. By centering the experiences of Hijra Bengali refugees, this paper both disrupts victimizing narratives from the Global North and reframes top-down belonging, demonstrating how Hijras have been producing and maintaining their own belonging outside of the ambit of the refugee regime and the state.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it