Becoming Hijra in Dhaka: Discourse, Pleasure and Identification

This chapter brings into view the processes through which one becomes a hijra. A focus on becoming not only challenges the dominant intellectual and cultural proclivity to read hijras through the optic of biological defect or lack but also foregrounds the problematic attribution of failure/lack/inadequacy in the popular representations of hijras as asexual, emasculated third sex/gender and/or as eunuchs. Rather than reading hijras through the lens of failure and defect, the hijra subject position is better understood as a route to varied erotic, gender and ritual possibilities, the attainment of which requires a continuous and dextrous mastery of various acts and arts, straddling and navigating various conceptual and societal domains that are often ideologically and practically incommensurate. Attending to these acts, practices, rituals, meanings and various identificatory practices brings into view the process of becoming a hijra – even when such becoming entails concurrent complicity with and opposition to hetero-patriarchal social order.