Differs in Dignity: Shame, Privacy, and the Law

Abstract

Current legislation surrounding hijras and other third-gendered populations in India pivot around the notion of dignity. Legal redress aspires to give dignity to hijras, a majority of whose lives are marked by poverty. Yet, the notion of dignity is not transparent and has a very different career in the domain of religious selfhood. In fact, claims of religious importance that hijras make either through myths, livelihood, or personhood qualify them as ascetic-erotic figures. And ironically, asceticism for hijras is achieved through publicly displaying transgressions without accounting for dignity and shame. The notion of dignity, I argue, is an alibi for making private issues of sexuality and shame, which is also a way for eroding an older form of sovereignty, namely, the clown. This chapter will look at the norms that the Indian state hopes to instill in hijras through attaching to them notions of dignity and privacy. In some ways, we see a confrontation between globalizing notions of trans with its attendant secular discourses of rights and identities that have become a yardstick to measure the health of liberal democracies and a historical form of being hijra. Such a confrontation necessarily means rethinking the work of binaries such as dignity and shame, public and private. By bringing materials from religious texts on asceticism, trans narratives, hijra autobiographies, and ethnographic and anthropological archives, I will track how being trans in India is changing in correspondence to changing material realities.