Beyond emasculation: Pleasure and Power in the making of hijra in Bangladesh

Masculinity is commonly assumed to be linked with the phallus: the symbolic expression of the position ascribed to and taken by people who have or are deemed to have a penis. Recent scholarship has sought to de-couple manhood and masculinities from bodily gender, i.e. from the penis. However, the link between the penis and masculinity persists in scholarly writing and popular culture and is evident in the way that male bodied people who through choice or accident give up or lose their penis are assumed also to give up or lose their masculinity and construed as not men or as half a man. This book challenges this persistent linking of masculinity and the phallus by taking seriously the claims of a group of people to have conquered masculinity - rather than lost, given up or failed at masculinity – precisely by symbolically setting aside and/or sacrificing their male genitalia, eschewing the penis as the primary site of sexual pleasure and by taking on feminine comportment and attire as part of the ritual occupations that publically mark them as ‘hijra’. Based on long-term ethnographic research with hijras, the emblematic figure of South Asian sexual and gender difference, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this book proposes the hijra as a counter-cultural formation that embodies not only a direct contrast to hegemonic patterns of masculinity but also as an alternative subculture offering the possibility of varied forms of erotic pleasures and practices otherwise forbidden in mainstream society.