Alternative genders are not rigid categories but multiple, changing identities shaped by a variety of sexual and social forces. Gayatri Reddy’s thoroughgoing ethnography of hijras—the “third sex”—in Hyderabad, India, furthers Lawrence Cohen’s critique of essentialized third-sex and gender categories and his location of the body along a multiplicity of differences. Reddy shows that hijras’ identities and social relations are inscribed and configured through their bodies and their fictive kinship instead of solely through their use of receptive, rather than penetrating, sexual positions. She reframes hijra identity and embodied practice in terms of achieving respect and authenticity, and she highlights the complex relationships that exist between the sexual, moral, local, and global economies.

Hijras locate themselves outside the gender binary frame of reference and focus on their gender liminality. They emasculate themselves by excising their testicles and penises to gain fertility powers, which they bestow on newlyweds and children. They gain identity, respect, and authenticity as long-haired, asexual ritual intermediaries who wear saris, pluck their facial hair, and hold fictive kinship ties with other hijras. Hijras who do not renounce their sexual desires for receptive sexual roles, who have male “husbands,” or who engage in sex work with men are stigmatized. The tension between asceticism and eroticism is always present in hijras’ lives.

Reddy explains the ambivalent readings of contemporary hijras in terms of their diverse roles throughout history. In ancient times, they were political and religious actors who had access to all spatial domains and segments of the population. Under colonialism, hijras became representatives of Indian femininity, sexually and politically dominated by the British. Ghandi questioned the homology of sexual and political dominance by proposing a dissident androgyny in which sexual renunciation would become a powerful moral force and the basis for Indian authenticity, respect, and identity. Contemporary hijras draw on this image, highlighting their identity as emasculated persons who cannot reproduce to present themselves as “ideal citizens of the modern nation-state.” By recasting themselves as “the embodiment of respect and morality,” they make the body “central to constructions of gender, authenticity, and modernity” (p. 223).

At the same time, hijras assert their social marginality by identifying as Muslim, making a “subaltern statement about religion, identity and citizenship. It is Hijras’ supralocality, their ability to cross borders of gender, religion and the nation, that allow their Muslim positionality” (p. 120). As metasignifiers of potential for transnational and transcultural citizenship, hijras hold the only transcendental position in a world of categorical absolutes. By exposing their mutilated genitals to others, hijras mock male powers and the procreative imperative, invert the powers in their favor, and gain respect.

Hijras’ corporeal understanding of a socially constituted sexuality is rooted in a multiplicity of differences. The body is the medium through which hijras enact individuality, and respect is the currency through which they construct it. The idiom of respect is a primary marker of difference between hijras and other kotis—effeminate men who desire receptive same-sex intercourse. Reddy shows that these morally evaluated modes of differentiation vary along the axes of genital excision, kinship, class, clothing, and religion. Hijras gain authenticity through their essential asexuality, symbolized by their absence of genitals and use of saris, in opposition to kada-catla kotis, effeminate men who use male clothing, have sex with other men, and are associated with sexual excess and inauthenticity, and to zenanas, male dancers who adopt women’s clothing for performances but do not emasculate themselves and therefore have no access to divine powers. Whereas kada-catla kotis and zenanas can be married to women and have children, hijras cannot.

These categories based on gendered practices coexist and intersect with the category “gay,” based on choice of sexual partner. The “different sexual classificatory grids in India and their varying emphases on modernity illustrate fluid constructions of sexual subjectivity in the region” (p. 221). Reddy challenges Michel Foucault’s notion of a modern homosexual persona and the idea of a coherent, universal gay identity. She demonstrates that colonial relations and transnational flows of knowledge, commodities, and narratives affect the cultural production of homosexual identities. Hijras and kotis reflect the complex, negotiated nature of contemporary sexual identity, which calls into question notions of sexuality, culture, and modernity.