She pricked thee: hijras fucking men in rural India

Abstract

This paper studies the desire of men to be penetrated by hijras who are usually either referenced as India’s ‘third gender’ or translated as trans women. By studying this specific desire I not only show how sexuality always exceeded prescribed rules, cultural or otherwise but also how meanings come to get attached to bodies, acts, desires, and sexuality. In other words, the citational relationship between bodies, sexuality, and gender can not only be performed but can also be transfigured depending on desires and relationships. Hijras have been studied intensively in public health for the last twenty years as a population at high risk for HIV. Concurrently, an impressive body of scholarship emerging from anthropology has shown how insufficient the hetero/homo binary is to understand how sexuality is lived in South Asia. Based on ethnographic research conducted regularly from 2008 to 2018 in the rural districts of Orissa, a state in Eastern India, amongst hijra sex workers, I study the sexual encounters between hijras and their clients. I do so in order to argue against an impoverished understanding of culturally determined sexuality. In other words, while hijras and men were more than aware of the meanings that being penetrated entailed, their desires went beyond following those rules.