Re-presenting the Hijras of South Asia: Toward Transregional and Global Flows

Popularly described as neither men nor women or a third sex/gender, hijras exist as vibrant and variegated subcultures across South Asia despite colonial and postcolonial persecution. While psychological and criminological approaches shaped research on hijras till the 1980s, holistic empathetic ethnographies that emerged in the 1990s positioned the hijra as a quintessential pan-Indian third gender community that challenged western sex/gender dimorphism and was organized around the ideal of emasculation rooted in Hindu myth and ritual. Soon, however, the ‘third gender’ model was critiqued for missing the intersectionality and complexity of hijra identities. These debates spurred a transformative proliferation within hijra studies over the last two decades, accelerated by HIV/AIDS, LGBTQI+, and liberal rights-based movements. This body of work has increasingly situated hijras as an evolving group, interacting with and mediated by various global and transregional flows. Growing research on hijras in Pakistan and Bangladesh, together with research from marginalized non-metropolitan locations of India and South Asia, have pushed us to rethink hijra subcultures, foregrounding the multiplicity and fluidity of hijra identities. This chapter traces these multi-scalar representations of the hijra figure through regional connections and variations (both across and within nations) that enrich our understanding of the transnational and transregional processes affecting gender/sexual identities beyond a west-centric paradigm of ‘globalization.