Customer Reviews

With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)

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I don't know why the previous reviewers are even taking an anthropology course, because they clearly lack the ability to think critically. This ethnography is very well written, and is a great example of how the binary gender system of the Western world is not an accurate description of the vast array of human experiences. Reddy shows how identity (in terms of gender, religion, sexuality, etc.) is created by negotiating the tensions between various socially constructed categories. In fact she is arguing AGAINST the notion of a third gender (so it seems like the previous reviewer didn't read the book carefully), and instead says that we need to look at human experience as just that - an experience. Each of us creates an identity through the way we live our life, and these various categories (male/female, gay/straight, hindu/muslim) are too restricting, and not an accurate portrayal of real human experience.

I had to read this for class. It was a mostly painful experience of thinking abstractly about the "third gender". As far as gender studies go, which I have very little interest on the academic level, I can image worse books. This book at least has narrative portions. Excluding chapter 1 it is actually readable. the idea of respect or "izzat"as being a primary consideration animating life for the Hijra is interesting. But as far as the foundations of Reddy's ideas, it's mostly the post modern babble students today are used to.... Ie gender is an essentially unknowable matter of performance and desire rather than a unchangeable reality of the self.