South Asian Review

ISSN: 0275-9527 (Print) 2573-9476 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsoa20

Third Gender Politics: Hijra Identity Construction

in India and Beyond

Suzy Woltmann

To cite this article: Suzy Woltmann (2019): Third Gender Politics: Hijra Identity Construction in
India and Beyond, South Asian Review, DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2019.1692275

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2019.1692275

Published online: 03 Dec 2019.

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SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW
https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2019.1692275

Third Gender Politics: Hijra Identity Construction in India

and Beyond
Suzy Woltmann
Literature Department, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Indian law has only recently stopped criminalizing what was per- Received 1 September 2019
ceived as deviant homosexual behavior and started extending full Accepted 1 October 2019
citizenship rights to its queer populace. The government’s
KEYWORDS
attempts to regulate sexual behavior was often steeped in anti-
Diaspora; hijra; third-
quated Orientalist colonial practices that rendered non-binary gender; Other; India;
subjects voiceless. Indian youth who identify as hijras, a third gen- Orientalism; colonialism
der who are usually born male but present as female, often
experience alienation and stigmatization both at home and in
diaspora. This leads to what I call ideological diaspora – internal
diaspora founded in cultural and physical exile even at home.
Systematic marginalization makes hijras subaltern subjects, which
affects the lives of diasporic youth trying to create dialogic identi-
ties. While hijras are usually either absent or objects of ridicule in
Western media portrayals, looking at rather than through the
third-gender subject is one way to allow the assertion of identity.
This may take place through sensitive portrayals of hijras in film
and novels, or through publications and autobiographic texts that
allow for complex narratives and voice. Third-gender youth grow-
ing up in ideological and/or literal diaspora need these represen-
tations to feel a sense of community and move from being seen
as Other to “another.”

Introduction
On September 6, 2018, India’s Supreme Court struck down a law that criminalized
homosexuality. The Court also ruled to extend citizenship rights to LGB people, a
landmark ruling that came after years of state-sanctioned incarceration and violence
against its queer populace. This followed a 2014 ruling that allowed hijra and trans-
gender people to claim third-gender legal status instead of having to choose a male
or female identity. While these legal changes represent a positive move for people
who identify as third-gender, they still experience systematic marginalization both at
home and abroad. As argued by Jyoti Puri (2016), India’s penalization of certain
modes of sexuality is part of a larger attempt to control social order and therefore

CONTACT Suzy Woltmann kwoltman@ucsd.edu Literature Department, University of California, 2232

University Avenue, San Diego, CA 92104, USA
ß 2019 South Asian Literary Association
2 S. WOLTMANN

further sanction the state. Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalized
homosexual behavior, is just one cog in the wheel of many overlapping laws and cus-
toms that seek to regulate sexuality. Part of this regulatory practice involves concep-
tually aligning hijras with criminality and producing a discourse of protecting
children from perceived deviant sexuality. Implications of the gender dichotomy as it
operates spatially and politically alter tangible lived experiences of those who navigate
between gender identities or leave that system behind altogether. The third-gender
subject is often categorized as outside dominant constructions of gendered identities,
and this outsider designation is compounded by Orientalist Western views. Different
forms of colonial production interpellate gendered subjects in India and across the
Indian diaspora. Young people who identify as hijras face particularly grueling cir-
cumstances both at home and in diaspora, from a culture of exclusionary practices
based in belief systems, to cultures that alienate and stigmatize. The displacement,
alienation, and homelessness that many hijra youth experience leads to what I call
ideological diaspora – a form of internal diaspora predicated on intersectional oppres-
sion and exile. While hijras still usually live in their ancestral home, society’s rejec-
tion of their community leads to diasporic experience. However, seeing third-gender
people as non-binary subjects allows for personal and political self-construction that
can lead to agency.
The hijra community has often been treated as the racialized and sexualized Other
both at home and abroad. Edward Said (1978) says the Western imagination constructs
the East through a combination of ideological apparatuses that present the Orient as fem-
inine and inferior. The West textualizes and canonizes the East through a series of
ascribed traits that create a pervasive notion of it as an immutable Other. Said’s work has
been extended by Joseph Boone (2015) and Lila Abu-Lughod et al. (2001), who explore a
more complex view of gender as it functions in relation to Orientalism. Boone argues that
part of Orientalism involves the West encoding the East as deviant and homoerotic but
that this encoding is part of a larger cultural production that goes both ways. Abu-Lughod
asserts that the West sensationalizes the notion of gendered oppression in the East rather
than simply creating awareness. Due to oppression, normative lack of representation, and
then sensationalism when represented, we rarely hear subaltern voice. Western discourse
attempts to translate this voice, which silences it through misappropriation. The act of
constructing hijras as unknowable Other makes any translation of their words “necessarily
involve an act of violence whereby the object of representation is defined exclusively in
terms of the subject’s categories of understanding” (Su 2001, 39). However, as Marjorie
Garber (1992, 90) argues, looking “at rather than through” the third-gender subject can
prevent imperialistic fetishism and subaltern silencing . Instead of configuring the third-
gender subject in terms of a gender binary, we should look to them as a separate category.
This reflects the 2014 decision to allow hijra and transgender people to identify as third-
gender and extends Judith Butler’s (1999) assertion that gender is culturally constructed.
Regarding hijras as a separate liminal and fluid category moves them from being objecti-
fied Others to subject “anothers.” This is particularly important to understand the lived
experiences of hijra youth. While navigating a potentially bifurcated cultural and national
identity, hijra youth also face the challenge of constructing a gender and sexual identity
that falls outside of normative taxonomy.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 3

Hijra Culture and Stigma

Hijras experience regular stigmatization despite having a long history in Indian culture.
Hijra communities have existed since antiquity, but perception of their gender and sex-
ual difference often leads to social exclusion and persecution. They are almost always
born biologically male but present as female, and sometimes undergo castration as part
of their induction into the community. As Serena Nanda (1999, 30) argues, being hijra
“means not only divesting oneself of one’s masculine identity, but also taking on a fem-
inine one”. While there has traditionally been a conspiracy of silence surrounding hijra
culture, it seems that most enter the community in their youth because of social, legal,
or economic pressures (1999, 116). Often rejected by their families or prosecuted for
prostitution, hijra youth join the community under already marginalized circumstan-
ces, and this is often compounded further by the treatment hijras receive societally.
Usually hijras join of free will in their teen years, but sometimes are given over to the
community by impoverished families (1999, 117). This means that hijra identity is con-
stituted not only on an individual basis, but also as interpellation through other inter-
sections of identity, such as class and economic status.
Western treatment of hijras has often portrayed them as intersex or hermaphroditic
men-women, but the hijra community protests this naming. They largely consider
themselves a third gender that operates separately from imposed conceptions of gender
performative identity. As such, they do not conform to traditional notions of gender or
sexuality. Hegemonic Indian society has often misunderstood their way of life, gender
expression, and sexuality. Hijras have traditionally been ignored or abused through a
process of social exclusion, which makes it difficult for them to find jobs or attain
social mobility. However, because of their association with mysticism they are often
asked to bless infants or perform at weddings. Because hijras were for so long not rec-
ognized politically they often had to rely on unusual sources of employment such as
prostitution (which further stigmatized them) or occasional performance in religious
rituals. The labor and citizenship difficulties hijras historically faced were compounded
by British colonialist laws. These laws criminalized what was perceived as homosexual
behavior based on a misunderstanding of hijra culture. Colonial archivists tried to clas-
sify them by calling them intersex or castrated men but attempts to categorize based on
a known binary fails when applied to hijras. If colonial Britain viewed homosexuality
as “a silence or a nameless offence, there is an even greater silence surrounding the
hijra” (Haefele-Thomas 2012, 46). This reinforces hierarchical structuring and oppres-
sion from a young age. Vinay Lal (1999, 121) asserts the importance of moving away
from primitive anthropologies such as Orientalism in order to understand the
“significance for the cultural politics of knowledge in our times” surrounding the hijras.
Attempting to regulate hijra identity in terms of Western gender ontologies fails
because it reduces them to “inadequate” binary categorizations (1999, 129). Hijra
refusal to fit into normative Western categorization demonstrates the Indian social
acceptance of diversity (1999, 131). However, even Nanda (1999, 30), who wrote argu-
ably the most complex ethnographic study of hijras to date, depicts hijras in terms of
their perceived deviance: she says that their use of verbal insults is a significant part of
“the construction of their gender variance, as noted by early European overseers and
the contemporary Indian media.” This portrayal relies on outsider sensationalist views
4 S. WOLTMANN

that often enforces silence. For hijras, this enforced silence is enacted because of the
intersectionality of their gender fluidity, race, class, and economic status.

Ideological Diaspora
This systematic racialized and sexualized marginalization has made hijras subaltern
subjects. As Gayatri Spivak (1988) argues, the subaltern’s voice is often lost in transla-
tion to Western discourse. This means they have difficulty achieving political agency
and are often silenced. British colonization of India and subsequent Orientalism has
led to a particularly troublesome spectacle of the victimized sexual Other. Part of the
creation of the Orient-as-Other is articulated through how “state power seizes on vul-
nerability to justify neocolonial intervention” (Atluri 2012, 721). Imperialist violence is
perpetuated through rigid conceptions of the Orient and subaltern and especially gen-
dered and sexualized bodies in these contexts. Rationalizing subaltern bodies as infant-
ile and vulnerable is a means by which the dominant hegemony justifies invasive
paternalism (2012, 722); the “construction of the vulnerable sexed/gendered body con-
tinues to be used as an alibi for Western imperialism” (2012, 723). This is especially
problematic for children and youth, who have even less agency than their adult coun-
terparts. Further, I argue that the hijra community and especially its youth experiences
the displacement and exile of traditional diaspora. Traditional diaspora studies involve
communities who have been, often forcibly, moved from their ancestral home. While
hijras sometimes immigrate to other countries and experience literal diaspora, they
also experience ideological diaspora at home. Like traditional diasporic peoples, hijras
are removed from what was their home and forced to renegotiate their identities as
outcasts. Diasporic identity is formed pluralistically; it takes place across several inter-
sectional axes, creating a double consciousness. Because of these similarities, I contend
that diaspora studies can be extended to communities that are displaced even in their
home country through authoritative state apparatuses that seek to deny and
exclude them.
This affects the lived experiences of diasporic youth, such as hijras, trying to con-
struct a dialogic identity. As Rahul Gairola (2016, xv) argues, “home is also gendered
and sexualized”, and “has been deployed to exclude queer diasporas” (2016, xvi). Queer
youth embody the diasporic experience because they are often rejected from the state-
regulated heteronormative idea of home. Belonging to a diaspora necessarily means
national exclusion (6), which causes displacement, alienation, and isolation. Gayatri
Gopinath (2005, 1) says that the queer diasporic body, such as that of the hijra,
“becomes a historical archive for both individuals and communities, one that is exca-
vated through the very act of desiring the racial Other”. The way we talk about sexual-
ity is “inextricable from prior and continuing histories of colonialism, nationalism,
racism, and migration” (2005, 4). The queer diaspora allows us new ways to consider
traditional understandings of backwards-looking diasporic thought and instead recon-
stitute it in terms of forward-looking desire. As part of this desire, we need to recon-
sider what was once seen as the sexualized, racialized Other in terms of a more
complex understanding. Western imperialism creates a binary of victim and intervener
that is just a masked version of colonist and colonizer. Often, covert, supposedly
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 5

ethical, imperialist impositions lead to increased hijra spectrality. The spectacle of the
hijra is just another form of oppression, since it exchanges traditional social exclusion
to active degradation and brutality. This is insidiously dangerous, since dominant dis-
course reconceives and fetishizes the gendered Orient subaltern by trying to use them
as a focal point for political action. Depictions of hijras, especially hijra youth, as vic-
tims who must be saved by Western political intervention is Spivak’s “white men sav-
ing brown women from brown men” being re-articulated in new terminology (Spivak
1988, 92).
Hijras are usually either conspicuously absent, or present but ridiculed, in Western
media portrayals. The subaltern voice is lost in translation: “hijras have been labeled as
trans, India’s lady boys, India’s third sex, drag queens, and a whole host of other
English terms” to fit Western conceptions of what differently-gendered subjects might
be, instead of what hijras have claimed to be – a third gender (Atluri 2012, 727). Many
contemporary travel dialogs perpetuate the idea of the hijra Other as misappropriated
through dominant discourse. To appeal to tourists seeking exotic encounters, travel
websites often write about hijras in an exploitative manner. These websites compare
hijras to aliens and animals in a way that portrays them as vicious, sexualized, and
entirely Othered. The Google search “hijra teenager,” which hijra youth might under-
take in a desire to find other people like themselves, leads only to pornographic images
and videos. Even contemporary TV shows, like the American show Outsourced, often
participate in further ridicule and spectacle, in this case by portraying a hijra stripper
in a sexual, scandalous performance (Borden 2011). This type of mass media can act as
a means by which a single dominant class continues covert control over the marginal-
ized; in fact, Bell Hooks (1995, 111) compares television to a form of colonization of
the mind. The colonial process affects not only hijra youth experiencing ideological
diaspora but also interpellates all sorts of gendered identities in India and spread across
the literal diaspora.

Looking at the Third-Gender Subject

However, by understanding the system that creates hijras and other oppressed racial-
ized/sexualized subjects as Other, we can deconstruct it and allow the potential for
voice and visibility. Butler (1999) argues that subjects are interpellated into a patri-
archal system that denies non-male voice. By challenging the normative ideology that
creates gendered subjects, we can allow for a different type of language that can pro-
vide for political visibility. This change to ideology can be extended to treatment of
third-gender people. If subjecthood must be established before representation can be
achieved, then understanding the third-gender person as a different kind of subject
may allow them to finally have representation (1999, 44). Gendered identities are
“produced and restrained by the very structures of power” by which freedom from
these structures are searched through (1999, 45); and gender is always enmeshed in
the “political and cultural intersections” which create and maintain it (1999, 46). For
example, the September 2018 court ruling is fully enmeshed in gender, political, and
cultural intersectionality.
6 S. WOLTMANN

Since gender is constructed in an intersection of cultural and societal ideologies, the

limits of gendered identity expression “are always set within the terms of a hegemonic
cultural discourse predicated on binary structures that appear as the language of uni-
versal rationality” (Butler 1999, 54). If legible genders are subjects-to-be in a patriarchal
system, the third-gender person is even more so constructed in those terms (1999, 57).
Those who cannot be categorically defined and hierarchized are also oppressed. Since
they do not subscribe to the same rules and boundaries as the dominant system, they
are named transgressive Other. This disparity in terms of voice and silencing is socio-
political and temporally linked, which allows dominant speaking agents to suppress
and silence the marginalized voice (1999, 63). The “intelligible” genders of male and
female regulate normative boundaries of gender and sexual practice, and “the spectres
of discontinuity and incoherence” challenge these rigidly defined realms (1999, 66).
If we look at these specters in terms of their difference rather than trying to locate
them within the normative hegemonic sex/gender binary (and in failing to do so, defin-
ing them as Other), they may achieve political voice and potency. To try and locate
them within the heteronormative “matrix of intelligibility” risks denying them the
potential for agency altogether (Butler 1999, 67). Butler argues that “gender is a project
that has cultural survival as its end” (1999, 139). That is, gender and its performance
allow for the subject to survive but simultaneously the subject enacts the continued sur-
vival of the heteronormative gendered system. When transgressions that function out-
side of this binary system are understood in terms of it, the challenge simultaneously
reinforces it – we understand the normative in terms of the transgressive. Taken in
terms of normative gender roles, non-binary gender performativity functions in a space
of regulatory and even violent practices. These violent moments can be diminished if
the modes of becoming are understood in a cosmopolitan context instead of hidden
away or (re)produced as spectacle.
Attempts to get rid of a third realm of gendered expression “is emblematic of a fairly
consistent critical desire to look away” from non-binary subjects which risks underesti-
mating or erasing the subject or recreating them as object (Garber 1992, 17).
Addressing differently-gendered subjects as a third sphere rather than as failed men or
women allows for a more nuanced understanding of this third group and of ourselves
(1992, 17). The “memory and history” implied in constituting a queer subject demon-
strates how this third sphere allows for a renegotiation of normative ideology
(Gopinath 2005, 3). This third realm of being, when understood as a new category with
which to address gender identity construction, represents a historical change which can
help deconstruct the self-Other, man-woman, and Western-Orient binaries. The binary
gender system is normatively duplicated, so it is important to seek to understand those
operating outside of this system. Western psychology tends to look through, rather
than at, third-gender people (Garber 1992, 161). Instead, thinking about third-gender
as a “personal and a political, as well as an aesthetic and theatrical, mode of self-con-
struction” is vital to understanding them (1992, 188). This is particularly significant
when it comes to creating safe spaces for hijra youth. All children are impacted by
modes of self-construction to create the determining identity that acts in terms of the
self. However, some children and youth, such as hijras, face not only personal but also
cultural and gendered (and therefore political) identity crises.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 7

Hijra Voice: Identity Through Narrative

Diasporic identities are formulated pluralistically, stemming from and working against
community, imposing imperialistic powers, different means of language development,
and so on. This crisis of identity is compromised by racial, colonial, and spatial aspects
as well as by gender and sexuality. Identity is mobile and is constantly being translated
in terms of power relations that inform, interpellate, and compel. Therefore, diasporic
identity cannot be constituted simply in terms of space; it also necessitates a look at
political and sociological movements. Politics that inform history simultaneously
inform identity and the means through which that identity is represented. Texts that
stand out as taking an active role in invoking identity translation from the moment of
their publication are what Rebecca Walkowitz (2015, 3) calls “born translated.” Born
translated literature uses translation as an inherent part of its production so that it is a
part of the process of literary creation rather than something that happens after publi-
cation (2015, 4). I am interested in extending this paradigm to examine cultural prod-
ucts that come out of hijra diaspora and politics. Translation is a transaction operating
between language, culture, and political spectrums, and this is not limited simply to
works of literature; translation also occurs between intelligible identities. Born trans-
lated texts situate the audience/reader in a familiar situation and mode of understand-
ing while simultaneously reminding them that they are being asked to read into the
liminal space between shared cultural memory and imperialistic silencing.
One such text that portrays hijra people as equal another instead of racialized, sex-
ualized Other is found in Sridhar Rangayan’s The Pink Mirror, one of the first films to
portray Indian hijras sensitively. It also incorporates notions of dominant Western
ideology as introduced into Indian gendered cultures and the non-heteronormative
identities made and maintained at the margins of society (Rangayan 2006). While the
film falls into the category of comedy, it touches on deeper issues of breaking free from
ideological interpellation and succeeds at granting hijra voice and agency. The film
portrays two adult hijras and a teenager as they attempt to romance a budding male
actor. Due to its sensitive portrayal of a marginalized community, the film won several
awards and recognition in the international film community. The teenager in the film,
Mandy, is a Westernized character who initially refers to himself as gay. Ultimately, he
realizes that he is third-gender and simply lacked the vocabulary and cultural capital to
recognize it. By becoming involved with adult, non-Westernized hijras, he discovers a
shared cultural heritage and becomes who he was always meant to be. Similarly, Ian
MacDonald’s (2004) science fiction novel River of Gods introduces a futuristic third
gender, which demonstrates forward-thinking about inclusion of differently-gendered
identities in progressive society. MacDonald’s novel is set in a future India. “Nutes,”
which quite clearly hail from hijras, are part of acceptable and significant identity for-
mations. While the relationships between the nutes and other members of the society
in River of Gods are often problematic, nute voice is legitimate. Nutes choose to
undergo a surgical procedure to become third-gendered. This procedure is represented
as part of a self-created identity that is true to individual conception of the self as sep-
arate from imposed ideologies and dominant structure. The reader of this novel partici-
pates in subjective experience of anothers, including a cis-gendered male attracted to
nutes and a nute’s own narrative. By giving the reader the perspective of a futuristic
8 S. WOLTMANN

hijra and demonstrating hijras as a third category, this text shows how non-binary
individuals should have voice and subjectivity too.
Since hijra identity is mostly constructed at the intersections of gender, sex, class,
race, and culture, there has been little representation in literal diasporic texts. However,
British Indian author Salman Rushdie’s (2017) The Golden House depicts the anxieties
of a young would-be hijra living in New York after his family flees from Mumbai. For
the sake of clarity, I refer to D with he/his pronouns until after he begins identifying as
female. The novel is an epic familial odyssey that explores the dark side of diaspora
and the ways in which culture, family, empire, and sex collide with sometimes devastat-
ing results. As a child growing up in India, D is given over by his impoverished mother
to his father in exchange for a large sum of money. This mimics but subverts the trans-
actional experience of some young people sold into hijra communities. D feels that he
does not fit in with his half-brothers and their parents. To fashion a more certain place
for himself in their household, he tries to get his stepmother kicked out so that he can
fulfill the position of woman of the house. After her death, the family moves together
to New York, and D’s ideological diaspora of troubled gender identity becomes a literal
diaspora of growing up in exile.
D is always represented in terms of unbelonging. He is a bastard child in a previ-
ously cohesive family, “the youngest boy with the darkness and confusion in him”
(Rushdie 2017, 26). This darkness and confusion haunts D throughout his childhood.
He never feels at place at home, which leads to his attempt to take over his step-
mother’s position as housewife and caretaker. D is also haunted by encountering sev-
eral hijras as a child since he recognizes something of himself in them. Rushdie
portrays D as “androgynous, ‘man-womanish,’” a child “whose fate would be the
strangest of all” (85, 54). D is a diasporic subject both in Mumbai, where he does not
fit in with his family or to traditional gender roles; and after their move to New York,
where he is a literal diasporic subject. He says that “sometimes I feel like I haven’t been
born yet” (91), which indicates his lack of belonging even to human society. While he
may have been physically born, the disconnect between his desired identity and his
bodily one causes him to feel desperately alone.
However, D’s feeling of unbelonging begins to subside somewhat when he meets
Riya, a young woman who encourages him to explore his gender identity. Affirming
his diasporic identity, Riya says that “I see that you personally are probably in exile
from yourself, maybe ever since the day you were born” (Rushdie 2017, 97). This
implies that ideological diaspora can be both innate as well as imposed and, much like
hijra identity, functions at a complicated intersection. With Riya’s support, D moves
away from his family’s home, mimetically following the history of hijra exclusion from
their ancestral homes. Riya even describes hijra culture to D in terms of their diasporic
identity. She reads:
“Few hijras settle in their place of origin. Family rejection and disapproval probably
accounts for the uprooting. Having re-created themselves as beings whom their original
families often reject, hijras usually take those new identities to new places, where new
families form around them and take them in.” (141)
As ideological diasporic subjects, hijras are exiled from their original homes and
must seek out new forms of community. D’s move away from home and in with Riya
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 9

parallels this re-creation. Along the way, he takes on a more feminine identity until
finally he presents as female. D struggles most intensely with the idea of an operation,
which she feels is necessary to fully take on a hijra-like identity. She says: “Truth is, I
know what the hijra is saying, he she, insisting it would have to be all or nothing. If
you’re going to do it, you have to go all the way. Operation, everything, like a real
hijra” (350). However, living in New York, D is doubly the diasporic subject, although
this time from a community of hijras who might accept her and encourage her to be
“everything”. Without this encouragement, D still feels lost and filled with a “feeling of
strangeness” (144). This strangeness makes her unable to see queer potentiality for a
future in New York. Rushdie seems to argue here that the subject in diaspora must
find a welcoming community in order to survive. Not having that community, D gives
in to the feeling which haunts her and ultimately commits suicide. Her suicide note
details her continued feeling of unbelonging. It reads:
“In the Old Testament God destroyed the city of Sodom but I am not God and can’t
destroy Sodom. I can only remove myself from its precincts. If Adam and Eve came
into the world in the Garden of Eden then it’s appropriate that I, who am both Eve and
Adam, take my leave from the world in a Garden too.” (354)
This note, along with D’s regular comparisons to gods and goddesses, reaffirms the
correlation of hijras with spirituality. It also confirms D’s feeling of unbelonging even
to the sacred order. As both Eve and Adam, doubly diasporic, D must remove herself
entirely. The impossibility of subaltern voice “results in the paradoxical condition in
which utopia and death are linked, in which the subaltern’s death or disappearance
enables the subaltern to fulfill the ideal role of the resistant and inappropriable other”
(Li 2009, 2). As a subaltern diasporic subject who cannot fit in with American society,
D dies to fill the role of resistant Other. The subaltern voice is loudest in its silence,
when it is “the unemphatic agent of withholding in the text” (Spivak 1988, 190). It is
this power in withholding that creates the subaltern utopia, a no-place that is
untouched by colonial discourse and power regimes. It is only through D’s death that
“makes possible subaltern inaccessibility, unfigurability, and singularity” while also cre-
ating an “alternative to the postcolonial present” (Li 2009, 3). Through death, D defies
the attempts of others to categorize her either as a diasporic subject or in a culture
based on binaries. It is defiance through death, agency through silence, and subversion
of imposed categorization through sacrifice. Since she cannot be categorized in dia-
sporic terms, D dies – but her death causes those around her to think more about how
to develop further community for trans/hijra people in diaspora, so it is not in vain.

Trans/Hijra Youth: Personal and Political Self-Construction

While fictionalization is one way that hijras have begun to be represented in more
empathetic ways, publications and autobiographic texts also produce more complex
narratives. Theories of queer diaspora let us reconceptualize hijras on their own terms
of personal and political self-construction. Recent political renaming and narratives
allow the possibility of subaltern voice by allowing the hijra to be understood as a sep-
arate category instead of something challenging the heteronormative system. Hijras are
gaining voice and presence in a manner that defies imperialist imaginings and
10 S. WOLTMANN

destabilizes traditional binaries. An example of hijras gaining voice through personal

self-construction is expressed in a Joya Sikder et al. study in which the authors recog-
nize “members of the hijra community as experts capable of analyzing their own prob-
lems” and theorize the hijra community as equal “another” rather than fetishized or
colonized Other. The authors of this paper articulate self-location and the “unfamiliar”
nature of the hijra, which allows for inclusion of hijra voice with only mild alterations
into dominant discourse. This is achieved through something seemingly simple: the
authors sought out those in the hijra community and actively listened to what they
said, without forcibly emplotting their words into a preconceived conclusion. Instead,
the authors “involved them in exploring and analyzing their experiences of margin-
alization” (Sikder 2009, 2). This does necessitate some issues of leading and interaction
with the dominant hegemonic structure, but that the Indian third gender were asked
for their opinions and insight in this study as an equivalent category after so many
years of marginalization and exclusion is groundbreaking. Their ability to construct
their own narrative on their own terms allows voice, which then encourages younger
members of the community to achieve voice as well.
Another means by which hijra voices are being heard is through interviews and self-
authored texts, which enforce the idea of hijra as a non-male, non-female, third-gender
subject. In an NPR interview, hijra Abhina Aher (McCarthy 2014) discusses an early
longing to break free from imposed gender identifications. As a boy growing up in
Mumbai, Aher became obsessed with her (Aher now prefers feminine pronouns)
mother’s fashion and makeup. When discovered dressing up in women’s clothing, she
was punished by being forced to pray and pledge to never do that again. Aher faced a
difficult school life full of bullying and teacher-enforced marginalization. Her teacher
told her that “you are behaving in an extremely feminine way and that’s what is an
issue” (McCarthy 2014). Years of ostracizing led to multiple suicide attempts until
finally Aher made the decision to change gender identities and join the hijras. She is
now an advocate for the hijra and trans communities. Aher says that part of what saved
her life was seeing a cover of Bombay Dost, an LGBT Indian magazine publication, and
realizing that there are other people like her in the world. This sort of cultural dialo-
gism and community-building is extended through texts like Revathi’s (2010) The
Truth About Me, a thorough autobiographical account of the hijra author’s marginal-
ization, oppression, and search for voice. The text was picked up by Penguin, published
in English, and is readily available for consumption via online booksellers. In the book,
Revathi details her (she also prefers feminine pronouns) subjective perceptions and
experiences. She was born into a lower-caste family and abused from a young age for
her subversion of heteronormative practices and what society dictated to be inappro-
priate gender performance. Because of few employment options for hijras, Revathi
eventually became a sex worker and experienced numerous incidents of abuse before
seeking political agency. Her book explains the disconnect between self-perception and
societal views; the act and art of breaking past ideological structures in the search for
identity; and the importance of being open to shifting horizons and actively seeking to
allow subaltern agency. It portrays hijras as subjects that challenge the binary system
but do not reinforce it in a way that should provide useful to Indian youth attempting
their own construction of differently-gendered identity.
 SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW 11

While I argue here for the significance of recognizing hijras as ideologically dia-
sporic subjects, some third gender youth do grow up in literal diaspora. People often
correlate racial difference with gender/sex difference, and so the third gender subject in
diaspora is often seen as doubly other. This is exacerbated by a home culture that stig-
matizes both queerness and mental health struggles. Luckily, organizations such as
QTPoC Mental Health encourage South Asians to seek help with the idea of assimila-
tion while retaining cultural ideals. Simultaneously, these groups offer a sense of com-
munity to queer and non-binary youth in diaspora. As the founder, Dom
Chatterjee, says:
“There’s a dual struggle for queer South Asians to find community. First is at home
with family and extended family, and second is within LGBTQ þ spaces which are often
white-dominant. There’s little representation for queer South Asian people, which for
me meant I felt like I was bad at being queer and bad at being South Asian. QTPoC
Mental Health gave me opportunities to meet other queer and gender non-conforming
people of color and gain validation around that dual struggle.” (as quoted in Kini 2018)
This dual struggle reflects the double diaspora that I argue D experiences in The
Golden House. Unlike D, however, diasporic trans youth can find solidarity through
friends and peer groups: eight of ten South Asian queer-identified diasporic youth said
they found support through friends instead of family (Kini). Further, social media pro-
vides more interconnectivity and availability for these youth to find like-minded peers
than ever before. Trans South Asian diasporic social media stars such as ALOK (who is
Indian living in America and uses pronouns them/they) further provide youth with the
promise of queer potentiality – a queer future that allows for the intersectionality of
race and gender/sex difference. ALOK’s (2017) poetry, including “My Gender is My
Race is My Gender,” explores this intersectionality and how queer in diaspora formerly
meant white, and white meant non-acceptance. They write: “the relentless & exhaustive
ritual of asserting that we have always been – to the white queers who call their genders
new, and the Indians who call heteronormativity home. but I know my gender is my
race is my gender is my family is my queers” (ALOK). This deconstructs the known
categories of race, gender, and sexuality to reconstruct a more accepting community of
found family. Through activism, continued publications, and online presence, these
categories are slowly being broken down to allow a further breadth of possibility.

Conclusion
These examples – hijras represented as subjects with agency rather than exoticized
Oriental Other in film, fiction, studies, interviews, autobiographies, and social media –
all demonstrate the significance of looking at the third-gender subject. The notion of
looking at rather than through hijras also considers the argument put forth in Gayatri
Reddy’s (2005) With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. Reddy’s
ethnographic work further demonstrates the intersectionality that hijras face as people
with many aspects of identity. Reddy asserts the importance of understanding hijra
subjectivity through the lens of respect. This moves away from the Orientalist and sen-
sationalist views of much literature about hijras and towards a more nuanced and
equitable view. Reddy contends that even the designation third-gender “others” hijras,
12 S. WOLTMANN

since it defines them by their gender/sexuality instead of in terms of their other forms
of intersectional identity (religion, family, and so on). Newfound political visibility and
possibility for subaltern voice through the sharing of subjective experience doubtlessly
helped inform the 2014 law proclaiming hijras as third-gender citizens with full rights
as well as the recent decriminalization of homosexuality in India. Since the 2014 law
passed, hijras have reported better quality healthcare, less violent crime, and more job
opportunities. This stems from the simple act of seeing hijras as a third realm outside
the regulatory dichotomous system rather than delinquents attempting to subvert it.
We can hope that the 2018 law further helps hijra children and youth in their search
for identity and voice. Theories of queer diaspora and attempts to understand the
third-gender subject can have real-life consequences in everyday lived experiences if
rigorously addressed and applied. What was once seen as the racialized, sexualized
Other can be reinscribed as a different yet knowable “another.” For Indian children
and youth growing up in ideological diaspora at home, where the hijra community is
tolerated if not often accepted – or growing up in literal diaspora abroad, where third-
gender politics are often misunderstood, further complicating any attempt to construct
an identity – representation is not only important, but necessary for survival.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor
Dr. Suzy Woltmann is a literature PhD specializing in adaptations studies, gender and sexual-
ity, and the novel. Her latest projects include curating an edited collection that theorizes con-
temporary fairy tales and writing a queer feminist adaptation of The Great Gatsby. She lives in
San Diego with her two dogs.

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