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With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India. By GAYATRI REDDY. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 312. $60.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).
Appearing on the tail of a recent surge of interest in the hijra, With Respect to Sex is an edinography of these so-called eunuchs in Hyderabad, a city in southern India. Identified by the author as one grounded in a Foucauldian framework, this project examines the many axes of identity that serve to construct the hijra. In order to investigate how personhood is experienced by hijras, Reddy draws on two notions that serve as theoretical parameters by which she organizes and thereby explores such identity. The first is izzat, or respect, which anchors the individual in a larger social structure; that is, each aspect of identity confers with it a sense of respect or, conversely, sarm, or shame, that enables meaning for the individual. Second, these identities are embodied. In other words, for Reddy, subjectivity is material, and abstractions as such are of little use. Through these two conceptual lenses the author takes a theoretical standpoint on both identity and the hijras' notions of self.
This book is largely a reaction to the literature on the hijra, a body of literature that emphasizes the sexual nature of the group. Instead of participating in a representation that accentuates only one aspect of the hijra community, Reddy emphasizes the subjectivity-even the sexual characteristics-of the hijra as being constructed through a "multiplicity of differences." In this vein she spends considerable time exploring the different dimensions of identity. In chapter 2, for example, she investigates how the very notion of respect, captured in the term izzat in the South...