With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (review)

Appearing on the tail of a recent surge of interest in the hijra, With Respect to Sex is an ethnography of these so-called eunuchs in Hyderabad, a city in southern India. Identified by the author as one grounded in a Foucauldian framework, this project examines the many axes of identity that serve to construct the hijra. In order to investigate how personhood is experienced by hijras, Reddy draws on two notions that serve as theoretical parameters by which she organizes and thereby explores such identity. The first is izzat, or respect, which anchors the individual in a larger social structure; that is, each aspect of identity confers with it a sense of respect or, conversely, sarm, or shame, that enables meaning for the individual. Second, these identities are embodied. In other words, for Reddy, subjectivity is material, and abstractions as such are of little use. Through these two conceptual lenses the author takes a theoretical standpoint on both identity and the hijras' notions of self.

This book is largely a reaction to the literature on the hijra, a body of literature that emphasizes the sexual nature of the group. Instead of participating in a representation that accentuates only one aspect of the hijra community, Reddy emphasizes the subjectivity—even the sexual characteristics—of the hijra as being constructed through a "multiplicity of differences." In this vein she spends considerable time exploring the different dimensions of identity. In chapter 2, for example, she investigates how the very notion of respect, captured in the term izzat in the South Asian context, is not just a libidinized or eroticized term, as it is in some scholarly literature, but is also a moral one. In this way, izzat does not simply refer to the sex/gender axis of identity but is a useful rubric for discussing other aspects of identity. Also, in chapters 5 and 9 Reddy considers how notions of modernity versus tradition and locality versus translocality play into the subjectivity of the individuals within the hijra community. In addition, the author asserts how religion and kinship, in chapters 5 and 7, respectively, function as primary axes of selfhood for the hijra. Consequently, by analyzing elements of morality, culture, religion, kinship, class, desire, and pleasure in addition to sexuality and gender, Reddy embeds the hijra in their social context, thereby providing a more complicated and nuanced version of subjectivity than has been provided previously.

Related to this concern is another theme that emerges in With Respect to Sex. Reddy maintains that scholars' assertions about various elements of hijra subjectivity are products of the frameworks of the researchers rather than the self-identification of those who are being studied. This methodological criticism is a significant one for previous academic studies of the hijra, since almost all such accounts are written by a researcher who speaks for the hijra; very few people who identify as hijra speak for themselves in these analyses. This situation, Reddy argues, becomes particularly evident in the ways in which writers superimpose a stability onto the identities of the hijra; such an anchoring silences the meaningful contradictions and ruptures within which many aspects of their subjectivity can be accessed. To counter this omission the author devotes an entire chapter to the narratives of two hijras. Through these narratives Reddy highlights the necessity for the "ultimate basis" of theorization of difference/identity to be centered on embodied experience rather than disembodied knowledge.

Another major theme present in the book is that the figure of the hijra destabilizes hegemonic social structures. Not only do the hijra deride male and thereby, for Reddy, heterosexual power, but they also confront normative gender, sexual, and even familial systems. Yet the author does not fall prey to the rhetorical argumentative style of those whom she critiques; instead, she complicates the personage of the hijra by also illuminating how such an identity is complicit in these hegemonic structures. Accordingly, she...