Beyond Thirdness

Hijras are well known as the quintessential "third sex" of India. Like the Thai kathoey or berdache/two-spirit ones of native North America, hijras have long captured the Western scholarly imagination as an ideal representation of an alternative to the duality of the dominant Anglo-European two-sex/two-gender system. Reddy's engrossing ethnography moves beyond earlier work, however, in elucidating how hijra identity is not reducible to sexuality or gender alone. The work explores compellingly how sexuality and gender for hijras are intricately interconnected with crucial broader contexts of everyday life, including religion, kinship, class, corporeality, and hierarchies of respect. Even more effectively than most sexuality/gender theory, Reddy argues, the daily lives and narratives of these hijra informants reveal vividly the complicated, multidimensional, and fluid nature of identity and difference.

Based on intense ethnographic fieldwork with hijras and their communities in the twin south Indian cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, With Respect to Sex also offers a broader sex/gender "cartography" of the region, focusing in particular on various local categories of "men" who engage in sexual relations with other men or with hijras.

Hijras themselves are, for the most part, phenotypic men who wear female clothing, assume feminine names, and, ideally, renounce sexual desire and practice by undergoing a sacrificial emasculation—that is, excision of the penis and testicles—dedicated to the Hindu goddess Bedhraj Mata. In practice, their lives and aspirations are highly varied, often shifting pronouncedly in diverse contexts and over the life course. Nearly all hijras in their younger years engage in sexual relations with "masculine" men (or pantis), taking the passive/receptive role while their pantis take the active/penetrative role. Hijras often do so in exchange for money, as their central means of economic support. Most younger hijras yearn as well for enduring sexual-affectionate relationships with particular panti "husbands," whom they often support financially and practically, performing the daily caring tasks an ordinary wife might offer, such as preparing meals and ironing clothes. Senior hijras, however, commonly renounce sexual activity (often denying that they ever engaged in it), thereby cultivating an "authentic" asexual hijra identity and honor (izzat) and coming to support themselves primarily as ritual performers—singing, dancing, and offering potent blessings at weddings and births. Only some hijras actually go through the nirvan (rebirth) ritual of genital excision (and a very small percentage are born with "nothing there"); genital absence is widely regarded by hijras and others as "proof" of an authentic hijra identity.

The core chapters examine how the sexual identities of hijras crucially interpenetrate with other axes of identity and social life, including kinship, religion, gender, and class. Although many earlier accounts depicted hijras as living outside the family, Reddy portrays the vital significance of elaborate kinship bonds in hijras' lives. Hijras forge extensive kin ties with each other in their local communities and through a nationwide network—forming lifelong intimate guru-disciple relationships, becoming members of rits (a formal marker of kinship that signifies allegiance to a hijra house or lineage), and creating "milk" ties of maternity and sisterhood through rituals of nursing.

Hyderabadi hijras, further, all identify as Muslims as a central part of their identities while dedicating their lives to the Hindu goddess Bedhraj Mata, drawing on Hindu mythology in constructing their histories, and performing at Hindu weddings and births. As gendered beings, hijras also transcend dualities, by being partly both and neither male and female, and at the same time subverting as well as reinscribing normative gender categories.

Non-hijra key actors in Reddy's ethnography include especially kotis, "female-identified" men who desire and engage in receptive same-sex intercourse and adopt "feminine" mannerisms of discourse and practice. Kotis are most commonly "pants-shirt" (kada-catla) kotis, meaning that they wear male clothing, do not have an official kinship link with the hijras, and do not have the nirvan (rebirth or emasculation) operation. Reddy explores as well the...