My research interests include gender, sexualities, class tensions, social movements and globalization.  In my dissertation, I explore how internationally-funded NGO-led activism impacts the ways that sexual minorities form and organize their communities in India.  My analysis is based on an 18-month ethnographic study of interactions between a large NGO and two disenfranchised groups of sexual minorities in South India:  preexisting communities of hijras (gender non-conforming people assigned male at birth) and a newly emerging community of working-class lesbians and female-to-male transgender people.  My analysis scrutinizes shifting self-identification among hijras and transformation in traditional hijra relationships that are connected to NGOs' claims that such relationships are "against human rights."  I also analyze how NGOs use human rights discourses to encourage poor lesbians and transgender men to leave their villages and relocate to cities, where they struggle to find employment and create new support systems.  I also explore the plight of grassroots activists-turned-NGO workers, who must navigate the confluence of interpersonal struggles for financial and social power, their collective efforts to abide by regulations set and enforced by transnational funding agencies, and individuals' simultaneous struggles to move up the class hierarchy via NGO employment.  This project theorizes how NGO-led activism transforms previously existing communities of sexual minorities while articulating the ways NGOs shape new communities that this kind of activism makes possible.