Graduate Gender Program

Hijra, the icon of sex/gender non-conformism in South Asia, are ''male-bodied'' people who identify as female and sacrifice their male genitals to a goddess in return for spiritual prowess. While hijra draw on a narrative tradition that creatively mingles Hinduism and Islam, scholars suggest that hijra exhibit a special bias towards Islam. In recent times, as in the more distant colonial past, that association has been drawn on the basis of emasculation, the putatively defining ritual of hijrahood. Drawing on ethnographic research in contemporary Bangladesh, this paper challenges the association between emasculation and hijrahood. Becoming a hijra is a complex process. Hijrahood is an identity acquired through various and repeated ritual and gender practices that are described by my interlocutors as hijragiri, ''the occupations of the hijra''. Those occupations are construed as acts of devotion to both Muslim saints and Hindu mother goddesses, an eclectic cosmological frame of reference that defines and is practically acquired in and through ritual practice. I argue that hijra transcendence of the categorical boundaries and communal politics that divide Hindu and Muslim in South Asia is best accounted for neither in terms of an abstract theological pluralism nor in terms of hijra's ascribed and chosen affiliations with other subalterns. What Reddy (2005) refers to as hijra ''supra'' religious/national subjectivities emerge out of the plurality of their daily life practices and the incessant material and symbolic comings and goings through which ''hijrahood'' is constructed in South Asia.

This essay advances a regional critique of the Indian-centric scholarship on hijra, a publicly institutionalized subculture of people typically assigned a male gender at birth who often sacrifice their genitals in return for spiritual power. The unexamined Indian hegemony in hijra studies works to reify not only hijra but also India. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bangladesh, this essay offers preliminary reflections on the need to adopt a regional approach in place of a national frame in studies of gender and sexuality, arguing that hijra subjectivities are constituted at the interstice of intra-, inter-, and transregional comings and goings. The regional approach proposed here also allows us to take into account the intraregional and cross-scalar inequalities within the geopolitically constructed South Asia.

Highlighting the way cricket has become a site of a new nationalist masculinity in post-colonial Bangladesh, this paper examines the eruption of a recent controversy about a Bangladeshi cricketer's sexual entanglement with a movie actress just before the ICC (International Cricket Council) World Cup in 2015. The longrunning racial interpretation of Bangladeshis as being of short stature and frail in the popular Indian and Pakistani media has led Bangladeshi cricket supporters to view this athlete's sexual aggression, despite charges of rape and sexual harassment, as an expression of Bangladeshi masculinity. The problem is that in positing this athlete as a counterpoise to the dominant Indian and Pakistani cricket nationalism, the nationalist resurgence in Bangladesh produced an aggressively heterosexual and masculinist politics that relegated women to a commodity in the formation of a cricket-based nationalism. I argue that the collective cultural complicity with the making of this new masculinity is not just the product of a Bangladeshi patriarchy, but is rooted in a fear of a putative emasculation in the field of cricket by other nations.

Xulhas Mannan, one of the founders of Roopbaan, the first gay magazine published in Bangla in Bangladesh, and an activist friend, were brutally murdered at his residence in Dhaka. A local Islamist organisation with links to al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the murder. The killing of these two activists brought homosexuality into mainstream public view in Bangladesh for the first time in history, as the media reported the death with explicit reference to same-sex sexual activism, LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) rights and s 377, the anti-sodomy legal provision Bangladesh had inherited from British colonialism. In the aftermath of the murder, many of the front-ranking activists associated with the LGBT movement in Bangladesh either went underground or fled Bangladesh. On 19 May 2017, the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite security force in Bangladesh, raided a community centre in Keraniganj outside Dhaka in what was billed in the local and international media as a 'gay party'. Rumours began to circulate that the 27 men arrested would be charged under s 377 for 'being gay'. Drawing on ethnographic research and activism on gender, sexual diversity, health and sexual rights in Bangladesh, this paper offers an analysis of the wider socio-cultural context in which rights-based approaches to nonmainstream sexualities and gender identities emerged in the public sphere in Bangladesh. I contend that the public discourse and activism for sexual rights, including the repeal of s 377, needs to be seen in the context of the ongoing tension between differential ideological standpoints on socio-sexual movement and the appropriate praxis and strategies for the obtainment of erotic and gender justice in postcolonial Bangladesh.