I just finished reading a fascinating book called
Neither Man Nor Woman: the Hijras of India
by Serena Nanda (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Publishing 1990, ISBN 0-534-12204-3).
For those of you who may not have heard of them, the hijras are a group
of people in India who constitute a third gender category, considered
by themselves and by others to be neither men nor women. The term
"hijra" is often translated as "eunuch" and the archetypal hijra is
raised as a man and undergoes ritual removal of the genitals to become
a hijra. However, as Nanda shows, many hijras come from other sexually
ambiguous backgrounds: they may be born intersexed, be born male or
female and fail to develop fully at puberty, or be males who choose to
live as hijras without ever undergoing the castration procedure. The
cultural category "hijra" appears to be a magnet for a variety of
sexual and gender conditions: ambiguous sexual anatomy, impotence,
infertility, homosexuality, and others which may not have an analogue
in Western cultures.
The traditional role of hijras in Indian society is to sing and dance
at weddings and ceremonies surrounding the birth of a boy. They dress
as women and their performances include comic parodies of the manners
and body language of women. They are believed to have special powers
to ward off or expose impotence and infertility. Hijras constitute a
sect within Hinduism, worshipping Bahuchara, an aspect of the Hindu
mother goddess, but many hijras come from Muslim backgrounds and/or
consider themselves Muslims. Their status in Hindu society is
ambivalent: although they are revered for their special powers, they
are also feared, in part because they may use extortion-like methods
the exercise their right to perform and earn their fees. The typical
threat is to cause a scandal at a public function by exposing their
altered genitals. They have the reputation of recruiting new hijras by
kidnapping and emasculating boys, although Nanda found no evidence that
this is true.
Not all hijras also earn their living as performers. Other common
hijra occupations include begging and prostitution. The sexuality of
hijras is another area of seeming paradox: hijras claim the religious
status of sannyasis or ascetics, having taken the extreme step of
removing their genitalia. Nevertheless many hijras work as prostitutes,
many have non-hijra men as husbands, and many seem to be attracted to
hijra life after becoming homosexually active in adolescence.
Nanda's book is a very readable anthropological monograph. After
background chapters on the culture, religion and biological status of
hijras, she treats us to four separate portraits of individual hijras.
Then she sums up with an intercultural comparison of hijras with other
alternative gender roles including the berdache of native North America
and the transsexuals of modern Western societies. One intriguing point
is that although many societies accept the ambiguity of gender by
institutionalizing a third gender role, Western society seems quite
fixated on the concept that every human being is either male or
female. Even homosexuals and transsexuals in Western society are
considered to be firmly of one gender or the other, transsexuals in
particular being required to assert their complete identification with
their non-birth gender before being considered for surgery. The idea
that individuals could have mixed or alternative gender identities,
although common in many cultures, is quite foreign to the West.
I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in sexuality, anthropology
or India.
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