Hijras, Lovers, Brothers

This book recounts two years of living with a group of hijras in rural India. In this riveting ethnography, Vaibhav Saria reveals not just a group of stigmatized or marginalized others but a way of life composed of laughter, struggles, and desires that trouble how we read queerness, kinship, and the psyche.

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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.