Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Social Science Transgender Studies

Hijras, Lovers, Brothers

Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India

by (author) Vaibhav Saria

Publisher
Fordham University Press
Initial publish date
May 2021
Category
Transgender Studies, Rituals & Practice, AIDS & HIV
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780823294718
    Publish Date
    May 2021
    List Price
    $38.99
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780823294701
    Publish Date
    May 2021
    List Price
    $136.99

Add it to your shelf

Where to buy it

Description

Winner, 2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences
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 beyond the secular horizons of public health or 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.

About the author

Vaibhav Saria is Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University.

Vaibhav Saria's profile page

Awards

  • Winner, Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences