num_pages: 268
description: Winner 2021 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social SciencesHijras 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.
language: English
title: Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India
publisher: Fordham University Press