9058009527

‘Women’s speech’ and the notion of adat [‘habit’]

Most of the hijras we spoke with related tragic stories from their youth, explaining how friends and family ostracized and evicted them from their own households. Whether this ostracism is precip-itated by actual anatomical difference or by some sort of effeminate behaviour is unclear from the hijras’ narratives, and they appar-ently feel a political imperative to insist that the designation is entirely physical. Although a number of Indian researchers (e.g. G. Singh 1982, Mitra 1983, Sayani 1986, Sharma 1989, Jani and Rosenberg 1990) have worked to dispel the cultural assumption that hijras are bom as hermaphrodites, reporting in-depth about the life-threatening castrations and penectomies that hijras endure, a large portion of Indian society nevertheless believes that all hijras were born with ambiguous sex organs. This belief originates from a rather unyielding cultural connection of gender identity with anatomical appearance, a connection which overtly contradicts Jacobs and CromwelPs assumption that ‘in societies that recognize [alternative-sex] variations within their culture, anatomy is not des-tiny in terms of sex, sexuality, and gender’ (1992: 57). In fact, hijras have been performing such operations voluntarily within their communities for well over a century (cf. Ebden 1856, Davidson 1884, Faridi 1899), to such an extent that morę than 75