Hijras, Lovers, Brothers Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India / Vaibhav Saria.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Saria, Vaibhav, author.

Series:

Thinking from Elsewhere

Thinking from elsewhere

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rural poor--India.

Rural poor.

Gender-nonconforming people--India--Economic conditions.

Gender-nonconforming people.

Gender-nonconforming people--India--Social conditions.

India.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2021.

Summary:

"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 distinct from the secularized accounts within the horizon of public health programs and 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: that limpid liquid within young men

Prodigious birth of love

In false brothers, evil awakens

Interlude: standing at a slight angle to the universe

Something rotten in the state

Love may transform me

I have immortal longings in me.

Notes:

This edition also issued in print: 2021.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8232-9742-X

0-8232-9472-2

OCLC:

1247158027