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The Ungendered Self: Sex Reassignment, the Third Gender, and Gender Fluidity in India

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Political Sentiments and Social Movements

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Abstract

In this chapter, Ewing and Taylor examine how individuals in India negotiate contradictory and politicized possibilities for narrating the ambivalently gendered self. Ewing and Taylor focus on members of the Bengali middle class (bhadralok) who have gone through sex reassignment surgery to transition from the status of “man” to “woman.” They examine tensions among three different ways of understanding gender and its relationship to the self: the concepts of transsexual/transgender, the third gender, and gender fluidity. They focus on middle-class transitions because the bhadralok were shaped by colonial ideologies of power and gender. Today middle-class transsexuals must negotiate a transnational medical discourse that generates a rationale for SRS in terms of a rigid gender binary, which is in tension with Hindu traditions of gender fluidity.

We would like to thank participants in the Lemelson/SPA Conference “Culture and Political Subjectivities” at Columbia University for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this essay, especially Murphy Halliburton, who served as discussant, Jack Friedman, and Claudia Strauss.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Religion, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Katherine Pratt Ewing

  2. Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, USA

    Baishakhi Banerjee Taylor

Authors
  1. Katherine Pratt Ewing
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  2. Baishakhi Banerjee Taylor
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Pitzer College, Claremont, California, USA

    Claudia Strauss

  2. Center for Applied Social Research, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA

    Jack R. Friedman

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Ewing, K.P., Taylor, B.B. (2018). The Ungendered Self: Sex Reassignment, the Third Gender, and Gender Fluidity in India. In: Strauss, C., Friedman, J. (eds) Political Sentiments and Social Movements. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72341-9_7

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