Hijras, Lovers, Brothers: Surviving Sex and Poverty in Rural India by Vaibhav Saria (review)

Abstract

I an early, instructive ethnographic vignette, anthropologist Vaibhav Saria, who is living with a community of hijras (commonly referred to as a “third gender” in India), describes a conversation with an interlocutor who has just returned from conducting sex work along a local highway in eastern India. Nandita, a poor hijra, ecstatically shows off a used condom and proclaims she “finally ate Saajan” (8). Amid peals of laughter and jubilation, Nandita empties the contents of the condom into her mouth, momentarily consuming her lover’s semen before spitting it back into the condom. The hijra swallows and spits her lover’s semen repeatedly, declaring, “I want his smell in my mouth, so that I can smell him every time I breathe. It’s like perfume...” (8). Attuned to such intimate, intricate scenes of pleasure and desire, alongside the wider sensorium of affective labors and longings, Saria’s ethnography skillfully traces the textures and tapestries that make “the fullness of hijra lives in India” (1). Drawing on 24 months of living and traveling with hijras between 2008 and 2019—including 16 continuous months of fieldwork in Bhadrak and Kalahandi, two of eastern India’s poorest districts— Saria traces fraught webs of kinship, sexual fields of fantasy and fucking, libidinal attachments and gendered labors, as well as everyday struggles and quotidian pleasures. The author grounds his vital analysis in a decolonial critique of global public health, which both singles out hijras as biopolitical mascots for spreading information about safe sex and casts hijras’ own quests for survival and sexual desire as stigma-ridden, dangerous, and incommensurable with the normative goals of global health practice.