Cosmopolitan Sexuality - by Ahonaa Roy (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In a historic verdict, the Supreme Court of India in September 2018, struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and decriminalized homosexuality and granted personal rights and freedom to the LGBTQIA community at large. However, in December 2018, the Transgender Persons Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha (the People's House and lower house of Indian Parliament) that has negated and undermined the rights of the trans community in India. The Bill omits the reference to a 'neither male nor female' formulation, and covers any person whose gender does not match the gender assigned at birth, as well as transmen, transwomen, those with intersex variations, the gender-queer, and those who designate themselves based on socio-cultural identities such as hijra, aravani, kinner and jogta. This book articulates the ethnographic and anthropological studies of hijras (eunuchs) and the popular transgender culture in India through the case study of contemporary Mumbai. It studies how their identity is shaped through consumption of various practices of beauty and takes into account the direct provincial dialogues as to how the hijras negotiate different spaces of surgeries, clinics and medicine to shape their new forms of identity. It highlights how globalizing modernity would build a concrete understanding of the way local patterns of transgender sexuality and eroticism are shaped by this sort of culture. It attempts to build a more robust and complex understanding of sexual experiences among these subjects in the locale, thus projecting the intersection of local meanings of transgender eroticism that intersect global patterns of similar identities with their desire and sexuality. The local specificity of the hijra sexual economy relates to global transgender practices, thus proposing a nuanced discourse of space, culture and sexuality to the local context of the globalized and modernized India, instead of the articulation of global homogeneity of transgender identities"--

Book Synopsis

Cosmopolitan Sexuality articulates the ethnographic and anthropological studies of varied embodied projects in Indian metropolises. With particular reference to the city of Bombay, it draws evidences of gendered representations - their desires, appeal and aspirations to be and to express their sense of self. It attempts to establish arguments to a deconstructive notion of any fixation of identity categories and build a robust and complex understanding of sexual experiences, love, emotions and interpersonal relationships; an unusual way of local as well as global patterns that are culturally scathed in the contemporary new India. The book is relevant to contemporary embodiment studies - the invasive means of desiring corporeal reconstruction on one hand, and dress, ornamentation, and makeup on the other. Transgressive politics are discursively and materially constructed to their everydayness and their unique ways of re-representation. 'Health' is viewed in new dynamics of shared knowledges and communicative practices that has enabled building fresh arguments around community and public health, with new visions of the anthropologies of empowerment.

Review Quotes

'Theoretically sophisticated yet full of ethnographic detail, this book is a major contribution on several levels - to our understanding of the changes sweeping through contemporary India, but also through much of the rest of the world. Globalisation, the author shows, is not just an external force but penetrates to the core of both the self, the body and the emotions. Individuals and groups who rebel against established norms of sexuality are redefining those very terms in so doing. The interplay between modernity and tradition expresses itself in the complex connections between desire, self- representation, and intimacy on the one hand and the wider impact of capitalism and the market economy on the other.' Anthony Giddens, King's College London

'This highly original anthropological study of transnormative sexualities in a major Indian city connects the most interesting aspects of the current theories of sexuality and gender with the extraordinary cosmopolitanisms which flourish in the cracks of global modernity. It will be of interest to scholars of gendered identities, urban poverty, aspirational subcultures and dissident modernities.' Arjun Appadurai, Max-Planck Institute for Social Anthropology

'This vivid and theoretically provocative book provides a compelling, sensitive portrait of contemporary gender liminal representations in the city of Bombay. Through beautifully rendered stories and incisive analyses, Cosmopolitan Sexuality illuminates the corporeal aesthetics, sexual desires, fluid gender expressions and aspirations for belonging pursued by hijra individuals in their everyday lives. An indispensable book for scholars of gender and sexuality in India and beyond.' Sarah Lamb, Brandeis University