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Life History and Hijra Activism in India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2228560 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rovel Sequeira (0000-0003-2390-1402, University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 451-474 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/716645 |
| OpenAlex | W4200479315 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 20 |
The late twentieth-century economic liberalization that transformed India from a License Raj to a so-called NGO Raj paralleled a burgeoning interest in Indian hijra communities, aided by discourses about gender/sexuality rights circulating via transnational NGO networks. The opening decades of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of multiple life histories written by NGO-based hijra activists that were read as representing authentic hijra life; for instance, A. Revathi’s The Truth about Me and Laxminarayan Tripathi’s Me Hijra, Me Laxmi. Despite the linkage between autobiography and autonomous personhood in metropolitan literary cultures, these texts were read as testimonials of hijra communitarian experience. As one reviewer put it, autobiography “positions the reader as an anthropologist of hijra life.” A closer examination reveals that these works do not present evidence of hijra experience in all its raw immediacy. I will argue, instead, that like the testimonio, the nascent genre of hijra life history presents an idealized time line of movement from exploited subaltern to respectable professional social activist while the actual lives described by it don’t follow such a straightforward trajectory. The subject positions of woman, transgender person, disciple, migrant sex worker, employee, citizen, and author in these writings offer more diffuse genealogies of hijras’ political consciousness. Hijra activists both inhabit and resist incorporation into normative conceptions of belonging by leveraging their embeddedness within multiple competing filial and affiliative networks, from their natal families to their adopted imagined communities to their activist coalitions. Their writings are better read as autoethnographies of activism and enable us to rethink the role of NGOs in queer political life
Biography · Human sexuality · Personhood · Political science · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · History · Law · South Asian Cinema and Culture
The real thing
Autobiography
Human Rights and Narrated Lives
Reading Autobiography
'We Were Making History'. Women and the Telangana Uprising
Marxism, Ideology and Literature
To Render Real the Imagined
Transgender Shifts
An Epistemology of Collusion
Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India
Imagining Transgender
Sex in Development
"Men" Who Would Be Kings
Border/Line Sex
Romancing the Transgender Native
Global Identities
The Politics of the Governed
The Evidence of Experience
Queer Activism in India
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |