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

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 a...

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Superior document:Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE COMPLETE 2021 English
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Place / Publishing House:New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2021]
©2021
Year of Publication:2021
Language:English
Series:Thinking from Elsewhere
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Physical Description:1 online resource (268 p.)
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Other title:Frontmatter --
CONTENTS --
Introduction: That Limpid Liquid within Young Men --
1 A Prodigious Birth of Love --
2 In False Brothers, Evil Awakens --
Interlude: Standing at a Slight Angle to the Universe --
3 Something Rotten in the State --
4 Love May Transform Me --
5 I Have Immortal Longings in Me --
Acknowledgments --
Notes --
References --
Index
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.
Format:Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
ISBN:9780823294732
9783110754001
9783110753776
9783110754186
9783110753967
9783110739091
DOI:10.1515/9780823294732?locatt=mode:legacy
Access:restricted access
Hierarchical level:Monograph
Statement of Responsibility: Vaibhav Saria.