The X factors of sex: hijras, Victorian law, and digital porn in postcolonial India

ABSTRACT

This essay expands and transposes Kimberlé Crenshaw Williams’ notion of ‘intersectionality’ in the geographical and historical context of contemporary India. The article offers the theoretical heuristic of ‘intersex/tional’ identity to re-think the erotic lives of hijras in India following the Supreme Court of India's legal recognition of the so-called third gender. I begin by establishing a rationale for doing so, and then briefly move into a history of the pathologization of hijras as non-confirming genders from British colonial times to now. Following this introduction, I examine the limited representation of hijras in digital pornography, expanding my scope to the queer purview of Digital India. The questions that I ask and propose to answer are as follows: in what ways are digital articulations of hijras as erotic figures complicated through technology; and are these new modes of subjectivity that challenge hegemonic pathology of non-gender-conforming subjects?

KEYWORDS:

• India
• hijra
• pornography
• intersectionality
• digital
• queer

Acknowledgments

This article is in memory of Meena Alexander (1951–2018). The author thanks Anirban Kapil Baishya and Darshana Sreedhar Mini for their saintly patience and meticulous commentary and the anonymous reviewers who gave rigorous feedback. He also thanks Clarissa Smith and Anna Thompson at Routledge. Since coming to Perth, the author has availed the kind support of Paul Arthur, Tully Barnett, Ethan Blue, Tim Flanagan, Rikki Kersten, Timothy Laurie, Simone Lazaroo, Melissa Merchant, Vijay Mishra, Lauren O’Mahony, Grant O'Neill, Michael Prince, Nadia Rhook, Anne Schwenkenbecher, Leonie Stickland, Anne Surma, Arjun Subrahmanyan, Heather Tinsman, Carol and Jim Warren, Robert Wood and the inspiring students at Murdoch University. The author also thanks far-away colleagues who nourished this research: Barbara Bordalejo, Elisabeth Burr, Ana Mari Cauce, Adrian Chitralla, Megan Cytron, Rohit Dasgupta, Radhika Gajjala, Nalini Iyer, Dorothy Kim, Shabnam Rathee, Nishant Shah, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Bonnie Zare, and my Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) and Global Outlook Digital Humanities (GO::DH) colleagues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Nalini Iyer writes that ‘hijras are often referred to as India’s “third sex”, and they have become the subjects of numerous scholarly works in recent times. Hijras are born males (sometimes hermaphrodite or intersexed) who perform their sexual identity as female. Many adult hijras have undergone nirvan surgery (castration operation) as adults. Hijras wear female clothing such as saris, grow their hair long, pluck facial hair, wear lots of jewelry and makeup, and adopt exaggerated female body language’ (2009).

2 ‘Digital India’ is a Government of India initiative of the Modi administration launched on 1 July 2015 that seeks to deploy technology to the service, and of course surveillance, of Indian citizens. The Digital India programme claims to consist of three core components: the development of secure and stable digital infrastructure; delivery of government services digitally; and digital literacy for all Indian citizens.

3 See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1998).

4 I am here using the term ‘colonial mimicry’ to invoke Homi K. Bhabha’s claim that ‘colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference’ (1984).

5 Mobile digital media are also referred to as ‘the Fourth Screen’.

6 Kapur is drawing on the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective, in general, and more specifically referring to the celebrated essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988). We must here note that, for Spivak, the ‘subaltern’ is not a concrete class location. Rather, it involves a ‘social silence’ that is based on exclusion from political legibility, social mobility, and/or access to circuits of capital.

7 For more on this contradiction, see Reddy (2005, 263).

8 Here, I refer to the Bengali cinema movement that started in the 1950s which favoured naturalism, realism, symbolism, and serious plot lines over popular song-and-dance films (Bollywood). These films also seemed to be deeply invested in taking the pulse of India’s socio-political climate at the time.

9 For more on this, see Boone (2015).

10 For more on the ways in which digital content is mediated by biased algorithms, see Noble (2018).

11 I am using ‘third world’ here in Chela Sandoval’s sense of ‘U.S. Third World Feminism’, which she defines as ‘a location wherein the praxis of U.S. third world feminism links with the aims of white feminism, studies of race, ethnicity, and marginality, and with postmodern theories of culture as they crosscut and join together in new relationships through a shared comprehension of an emerging theory and method of oppositional consciousness’ (1991, 17).

12 For more on the limitations of language, see Jameson (1972), Voloshinov (1973) and Bakhtin (1981).