Citizenship Studies The prerogative of the brave: Hijras and sexual citizenship after orientalism (original) (raw)
Related papers
Show and Tell: Life History and Hijra Activism in India
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2022
The late twentieth-century economic liberalization that transformed India from a License Raj to a so-called NGO Raj paralleled a burgeoning interest in Indian hijra communities, aided by discourses about gender/sexuality rights circulating via transnational NGO networks. The opening decades of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of multiple life histories written by NGO-based hijra activists that were read as representing authentic hijra life; for instance, A. Revathi’s The Truth about Me and Laxminarayan Tripathi’s Me Hijra, Me Laxmi. Despite the linkage between autobiography and autonomous personhood in metropolitan literary cultures, these texts were read as testimonials of hijra communitarian experience. As one reviewer put it, autobiography “positions the reader as an anthropologist of hijra life.” A closer examination reveals that these works do not present evidence of hijra experience in all its raw immediacy. I will argue, instead, that like the testimonio, the nascent genre of hijra life history presents an idealized time line of movement from exploited subaltern to respectable professional social activist while the actual lives described by it don’t follow such a straightforward trajectory. The subject positions of woman, transgender person, disciple, migrant sex worker, employee, citizen, and author in these writings offer more diffuse genealogies of hijras’ political consciousness. Hijra activists both inhabit and resist incorporation into normative conceptions of belonging by leveraging their embeddedness within multiple competing filial and affiliative networks, from their natal families to their adopted imagined communities to their activist coalitions. Their writings are better read as autoethnographies of activism and enable us to rethink the role of NGOs in queer political life.
This essay advances a regional critique of the Indian-centric scholarship on hijra, a publicly institutionalized subculture of people typically assigned a male gender at birth who often sacrifice their genitals in return for spiritual power. The unexamined Indian hegemony in hijra studies works to reify not only hijra but also India. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bangladesh, this essay offers preliminary reflections on the need to adopt a regional approach in place of a national frame in studies of gender and sexuality, arguing that hijra subjectivities are constituted at the interstice of intra-, inter-, and transregional comings and goings. The regional approach proposed here also allows us to take into account the intraregional and cross-scalar inequalities within the geopolitically constructed South Asia.
The Hijras of India: A Marginal Community with Paradox Sexual Identity
Transgender people in India, commonly known as the Hijras, who claim to be neither male nor female, are socially excluded in Indian society. The uniqueness of Hijras lies not only in their existence beyond social structure but also in Indian society's historical acceptance of that position. This study aims to understand the sociocultural exclusion of Hijras, depending on their gender identity disorder and their paradox sexual appearance. An exploratory cum descriptive research design with a nonrandom purposive sampling including the snowball technique was adopted, to collect information from 51 Hijras at Kharagpur town from the state of West Bengal, India. The study shows that although Hijras have a sort of sanctioned and visible place in Hindu society, but in the contemporary Indian context, it is the gender nonconformity of the Hijra that has a major impact besides lack of a gender recognition, sexual expression, employment, decent housing, subsidized health‑care services, and as well as the violence they suffer, especially when they choose to take up formal works. Therefore, Hijras are controversial and minacious community in Indian society and their existence disrupts essential ideas about sex or gender. They need to be recognized as having a space on society's gender continuum. Vertical interventions of rights are greatly needed to address the unique needs of this marginalized group and recognizing them as equal citizens of India.
Gender & History, Issue 24:3
The visible emergence of gender/sexual identities in many postcolonial societies has raised complex questions regarding the relation between historical precursors of same-sex desire and gender variance and emergent forms of gender/sexual identification. In this context, the article examines the relation of hijra and kothi, two vernacular and putatively indigenous categories of gender/sexual difference in India, with postcolonial processes of identity formation. Through multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation), the article proposes that collusions between translocal subcultures and postcolonial institutions result in the attempted ongoing consolidation of gender/sexual identities like hijra and kothi. This continuity between subcultural and institutional processes of identity formation demonstrates the historical agency and involvement of non-metropolitan and non-elite communities in the emergence of 'modern' identities, but also results in historical discontinuities where emergent standardized definitions increasingly elide local variations in community and identity.
2008
By examining discursive struggles around sexuality in contemporary India, I show how and when the legal status of sexuality becomes used by individuals and communities to make political claims about their relations in and to the post-colonial nation-state. The ‘modern’ legal system introduced by British colonial rule installed state regulation of homosexuality and sex work in India. I look at when and how homosexuals and sex workers challenge these regulatory discourses and practices, considering these as post-colonial contestations over the legal and cultural meanings of “tradition” and “modernity.” I ask two primary questions: First, how do the legal and political challenges of these two groups become articulated in the face of local needs and practices and in the context of globalization and transnational concern about HIV/AIDS; and second, what do these challenges reveal in general about state power over how human bodies are used (biopower) in a postcolonial context and in speci...
Indigenizing sexuality and national citizenship: Shyam Selvadurai's
thefreelibrary.com
The intersection of feminist and postcolonial critique has enabled us to understand some of the co-implications of gendering, sexuality, and postcolonial nation building. Anne McClintock, for instance, argues that nations "are historical practices through which social difference is both invented and performed" and that "nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference" (89; italics in original). Women's reproduction is put to service for the nation in both concrete and symbolic ways: women reproduce ethnicity biologically (by bearing children) and symbolically (by representing core cultural values), and the injunction to women to reproduce within the norms of marriage and ethnic identification, or heterosexual endogamy, makes women also "reproducers of the boundaries of ethnic/national groups" (Yuval-Davis and Anthias 8-9; emphasis added). National identity may be routed through gender, sexuality, and class, such that "respectability" and bourgeois norms, including heterosexuality, are seen as essential to nationalism, perhaps most notably in nations seeking independence from colonial power (Mosse; de Mel). Shyam Selvadurai's historical novel Cinnamon Gardens, set in 1927-28 Ceylon, is a valuable contribution to the study of gender and sexuality in national discourses, for it explores in nuanced ways the roots of gender norms and policed sexuality in nation building. Cinnamon Gardens indigenizes Ceylonese/ Sri Lankan homosexuality not by invoking the available rich history of precolonial alternative sexualities in South Asia, but rather by tying sexuality to the novel's other themes of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and women's emancipation. This article will argue that, although the novel rarely links sexuality overtly to the nation, Selvadurai in fact makes the link through the tension between endogamy and exogamy. Ethnicity brought to you by COR w metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk