Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India

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 or irresponsibility 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 distinct from the secularized accounts within the horizon of public health programmes and queer theory. Engrossingly written and full of keen insights, the book moves from the small pleasures of the everyday laughter, flirting, and teasing to impossible longings, kinship networks, and economies of property and of substance in order to give a fuller account of trans lives and of Indian society today.

Author: Vaibhav Saria
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 06/29/2023
Pages: 268
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.01lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.63d
ISBN: 9780192873767

About the Author
Vaibhav Saria, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

Vaibhav Saria is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University. They received their PhD in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2014. Saria is also a member of QuTUB, an international team of researchers working to advance methodologies to measure and improve the quality of tuberculosis care.