Sexualising the Body: Passionate Aesthetics and Embodied Desires

Abstract

This article draws on evidence from ethnographic and anthropological understandings of Mumbai’s contemporary ‘trans’ culture, looking at bodies and embodied practices, such as enhancements, beautification and surgeries, as well as locating the specificities of gender and identity. Ethnographic vignettes highlighting the interaction between Titli, a transsexual woman, and some hijras (South Asian term for ‘eunuchs’) in one of the city’s slum-based localities further establish the anthropological and sociological understandings, and the nuances and intricacies in the construction of transsexuals’ bodies, identities and subjectivity in terms of the differences in appearance, performance and behaviour linked to their political claims.