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"In a historic verdict, the Supreme Court of India in September 2018, struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and decriminalized homosexuality and granted personal rights and freedom to the LGBTQIA community at large. However, in December 2018, the Transgender Persons Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha (the People's House and lower house of Indian Parliament) that has negated and undermined the rights of the trans community in India. The Bill omits the reference to a 'neither male nor female' formulation, and covers any person whose gender does not match the gender assigned at birth, as well as transmen, transwomen, those with intersex variations, the gender-queer, and those who designate themselves based on socio-cultural identities such as hijra, aravani, kinner and jogta. This book articulates the ethnographic and anthropological studies of hijras (eunuchs) and the popular transgender culture in India through the case study of contemporary Mumbai. It studies how their identity is shaped through consumption of various practices of beauty and takes into account the direct provincial dialogues as to how the hijras negotiate different spaces of surgeries, clinics and medicine to shape their new forms of identity. It highlights how globalizing modernity would build a concrete understanding of the way local patterns of transgender sexuality and eroticism are shaped by this sort of culture. It attempts to build a more robust and complex understanding of sexual experiences among these subjects in the locale, thus projecting the intersection of local meanings of transgender eroticism that intersect global patterns of similar identities with their desire and sexuality. The local specificity of the hijra sexual economy relates to global transgender practices, thus proposing a nuanced discourse of space, culture and sexuality to the local context of the globalized and modernized India, instead of the articulation of global homogeneity of transgender identities"--
List of contents
List of Figures; List of Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Bioengineering, Beauty and Racial Sensibility; 3. Contesting Violence, Constructing Power; 4. Festival, Spectacle, Eroticism; 5. Biopolitics and Biosocial Citizenship; 6. Performative Participation, Sexual Health and Community Development; 7. Cosmopolitanism: Rights, Citizenry and the Culture of Representation; 8. Postscript; Glossary; Index.
About the author
Ahonaa Roy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, and a Research Associate at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She is also a Tata Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge (2022). She has published widely on sexuality and sexual health, social medicine, sexuality studies, masculinity studies, embodiment and body studies and gender and subaltern studies. She edited the volume Gender, Sexuality Decolonization: South Asia in the World Perspective, published by Routledge in 2020.
Summary
Articulates the ethnographic and anthropological studies of varied embodied projects in Indian metropolises. With particular reference to the city of Bombay, it draws evidences of gendered representations – their desires, appeal and aspirations to be and to express their sense of self.
