Enumeration regimes, fractured recognition: Queer Dalit assertion in contemporary India

This article develops an enumeration-regime framework to explain the episodic visibility of intersectional subjects, focusing on queer Dalit assertions in contemporary India. It argues that recognition is produced and stabilised conditionally across regimes of enumeration. Enumeration is understood not merely as demographic counting, but as the broader legal, institutional and cultural processes through which populations become legible to governance, public recognition and knowledge production. Drawing on materials spanning colonial and postcolonial classification regimes, constitutional category formation, demographic enumeration of gender variance, juridical recognition, cultural production and testimonial narratives, the article demonstrates that subjects become publicly legible when multiple enumeration regimes temporarily and conditionally converge. Historical analysis of census practices, caste classification and gender enumeration shows how counting practices precede and structure political subject formation. Contemporary cultural and testimonial materials are read as forms of enumeration operating alongside or outside state classification, often without institutional stabilisation. The article argues that episodic assertion reflects structurally misaligned recognition systems. By situating queer Dalit assertions within a broader account of subject formation through enumeration, it explains why recognition fails to endure, with wider applicability to intersectional subject formations across social and legal domains, and how more enduring recognition might be produced.