1:15 PM, 12 January 2016 to 2:15 PM, 12 January 2016 at Harold Wilson Building, HWG/05, University of Huddersfield
Beauty and Embodiment: The Hijras in Contemporary Mumbai
Speaker: Dr Ahonaa Roy (Jindal School of Government and Public Policy and Visiting Fellow, CRISS)
Abstract: The paper portrays various spaces in Mumbai where non-normative sexualities interact in relation to the consumption of cultural or material resources with which they build their gender, identity and sexuality. In relation to this, this piece of work interrogates the hijra or the popular transvestite population in Mumbai, and the ways in which they represent their bodies. It explores linkages between these processes and the modern consumption of beauty practices, feminization of their bodies like the consumption of female hormone tablets, and surgical measures like silicone breast implants.
Through these mechanisms, the hijras embody beauty and other facets of bodily modifications in constructing their identity. These embodied practices of beauty by the hijras further charts the new meaning of the hijra body in respect to the local identification of their identity in relation to the global transgender identities. With regards to the body modifications and construction of identities, the paper also draws attention to the transsexual identified individuals in Mumbai and the clinical discourses that are related to transsexual experience in this context. Thus, the paper as a whole negotiates the various strands of transgender identities in Mumbai and (dis) similarities in which hijras represent their identities to the society, and claim their gender.