Winner, 2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences
Winner, 2021 Ruth Benedict Prize, Association for Queer
Anthropology Hijras, one of India's third gendered or trans
populations, have been an enduring presence in the South Asian
imagination-in myth, in ritual, and in everyday life, often
associated in stigmatized forms with begging and sex work. In more
recent years hijras have seen a degree of political emergence as a
moral presence in Indian electoral politics, and with heightened
vulnerability within global health terms as a high-risk population
caught within the AIDS epidemic. Hijras, Lovers, Brothers recounts
two years living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this
riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of
stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of
laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read
queerness, kinship, and the psyche. Against easy framings of hijras
that render them marginalized, Saria shows how hijras makes the
normative Indian family possible. The book also shows that
particular practices of hijras, such as refusing to use condoms or
comply with retroviral regimes, reflect not ignorance,
irresponsibility, or illiteracy but rather a specific idiom of
erotic asceticism arising in both Hindu and Islamic traditions.
This idiom suffuses the densely intertwined registers of erotics,
economics, and kinship that inform the everyday lives of hijras and
offer a repertoire of self-fashioning beyond the secular horizons
of public health or queer theory. Engrossingly written and full of
keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the
everyday-laughter, flirting, teasing-to impossible longings,
kinship, and economies of property and substance in order to give a
fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.
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