134. Mashrur Shahid Hossain

Abstract 134. Mashrur Shahid Hossain, Bangladesh.

“Toying with Number 9: Is Revathai’s The Truth about Me transgression or approximation of the technology of gender?”

This paper gives a gender reading of A Revathi’s autobiography, The Truth about Me, to explore if this hijra life story, arguably the first of its kind in English, attests to post-gender dissent against hetero-patriarchal scenario or, rather ironically, re-fuels gendered boundaries. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section, entitled “Transgressively Gendered,” discusses in brief the evolution of gender studies. It treks from De Laureti’s ‘technology of gender’ and Butler’s ‘gender performativity’ to Bornstein’s ‘gender outlaw’ and Stone’s deconstruction of performativity. The paper argues that if gender as ‘performativity’ destabilized our set notions of human identity, ‘transgender’ and ‘transsexual’ have questioned and queered notions of normalcy and completeness. The second section, “Queering India,” contends that homophobia, accompanied by disrespect for non-heterosexual praxis, was a western import in India. An informed glance at Indian myths, legends, sacred books, rituals, art, music, and literature will demonstrate that different traditions and genres in India, ranging from Hinduism to Buddhism and from the Mahabharata to Urdu ghazals, are accommodative, even sometimes appreciative, of homosexual, transgender, and transsexual issues and individuals. However, things have changed since the British Raj and the present India is rather conservative, even aggressively reductive, in its dealing with non-hetero-patriarchal concerns. Against such a complex scenario, the third section, “…,” reads A Revathi’s The Truth about Me as a curiously unsettled and unsettling queer text. Discussing how and why autobiography and OTF, or Obligatory Transsexual File, became a dominant generic mode for transgender authors and theorists since 1990s (Gamble 45), this section views Revathi’s autobiography as a dissenting narrative that puts India’s complacent heteronormativity into trouble and brings out closeted queer praxis, an Indianized version of queerity. However, the question that this paper raises is: does The Truth about Me transgress and carnivalize sexual and gendered boundaries as Butler argues the trasngenders do in Gender Trouble? Referring to Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: a Posttransexual Manifesto,” the present paper contends that the apparently transgressive mode of the narrative does not succeed much in transgressing gendering and gendered hierarchies as the protagonist less relishes on being plural and more laments for being entrapped in a male body. If “Number Nine” is what the hijras are derogatorily addressed in the south India, Number 9 is, etymologically, revered in Hinduism as a divine number that stands for the end of a cycle. The paper questions if the celebrated, and duly so, The Truth about Me is able to deconstruct the deterioration of Number 9 (i.e. hijras as being unsexed and, hence, divine), and reads this falling-short of being a dissent as a threatening demonstration of the oppressive homophobic culture.