A. Hossain

Beyond Emasculation: Being Muslim and Becoming Hijra in South Asia

Abstract Hijra, the icon of sex/gender non-conformism in South Asia, are “male-bodied” people who identify as female and sacrifice their male genitals to a goddess in return for spiritual prowess. While hijra draw on a narrative tradition that creatively mingles Hinduism and Islam, scholars suggest that hijra exhibit a special bias towards Islam. In recent times, as in the more distant colonial past, that association has been drawn on the basis of emasculation, the putatively defining ritual of hijrahood. Drawing on ethnographic research in contemporary Bangladesh, this paper challenges the association between emasculation and hijrahood. Becoming a hijra is a complex process. Hijrahood is an identity acquired through various and repeated ritual and gender practices that are described by my interlocutors as hijragiri, “the occupations of the hijra ”. Those occupations are construed as acts of devotion to both Muslim saints and Hindu mother goddesses, an eclectic cosmological frame of reference that defines and is practically acquired in and through ritual practice. I argue that hijra transcendence of the categorical boundaries and communal politics that divide Hindu and Muslim in South Asia is best accounted for neither in terms of an abstract theological pluralism nor in terms of hijras ascribed and chosen affiliations with other subalterns. What Reddy ( 2005) refers to as hijra “supra” religious/national subjectivities emerge out of the plurality of their daily life practices and the incessant material and symbolic comings and goings through which “hijrahood” is constructed in South Asia.

The paradox of recognition: hijra, third gender and sexual rights in Bangladesh

Abstract Hijra, the iconic figure of South Asian gender and sexual difference, comprise a publicly institutionalised subculture of male-bodied feminine-identified people. Although they have existed as a culturally recognised third gender for a very long time, it is only recently that hijra have been legally recognised as a third gender in several South Asian countries. This paper focuses on the transformation of this long-running cultural category of third gender into a legal category of third gender in Bangladesh, showing that the process of legal recognition has necessitated a simultaneous mobilisation of a discourse of disability in the constitution of hijra as citizens worthy of rights. While the international community views the recognition of a third gender as a progressive socio-legal advance in the obtaining of sexual rights in a Muslim majority Bangladesh, locally, hijra are understood as a special group of people born with ‘missing’ or ambiguous genitals delinked from desire. Furthermore, what was previously a trope of disfigurement based on putative genital status has now been transformed into a discourse of disability, a corollary to which several interest groups, namely the civil society, the state, international community and hijra themselves, have all been party.

De-Indianizing Hijra: Intra-regional effacements and inequalities in South Asian queer space

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.

Race and Cricket Narratives in the West Indies

Adnan Hossain asks who the best fast bowlers are, and why race matters in West Indies cricket.