ABSTRACT

A few years ago, the first organisation offering medical services for ‘men who have sex with men (MSM) and kothis’ was established in the south Indian city of Hyderabad. On hearing about the organisation, members of the hijra community (the socalled third sex or indigenous transgendered category) asked me, the itinerant anthropologist, to find out more about this much needed clinic – ‘our kothi clinic’ – as they referred to it, invoking the category and social formation loosely translated in anthropological and public health literature as an effeminate man who is most often the recipient in male same-sex encounters. ‘Last month, one of my “customers” from Saudi [Arabia] told me about it. I believe this clinic is only for us – kothis here and in the Garden [a popular same-sex cruising area in the city]’, Shanti, a hijra sex worker, explained, including in her lexical label both her fellow hijras and the kothis in the Garden. Later that same week, when speaking to self-identified kothis in the Garden, I was reassured that the clinic was indeed going to be established and that it was for ‘all MSM and kothis . . . but please tell hijras to come only on Sundays’. On further inquiry, I was told that this request was on account of the hijras’ stigma and its potential contagion: ‘If hijras come during the week, what will people think? Everyone will know this is a “homosex” clinic then, and our izzat (respect) will go. You can understand how this will look . . . So you tell them’, Rakesh told me. In Rakesh’s statement, hijras are clearly included as a recognisable MSM subjectivity/community, even as they are simultaneously excluded on the basis of respect (izzat) and the shame (sharm) of visibility. For hijras, this incorporation into the MSM or ‘men who have sex with men’ rubric, while a welcome avenue through which to access their ‘right’ to healthcare, is nevertheless an awkward habitation; in most contexts, they see themselves neither as ‘men’ nor as necessarily ‘sexual’, invoking instead their ‘traditional’ perception as divinely blessed asexual figures. Further, even as hijras articulate themselves within a kothi framework – a category and social formation widely acknowledged to have originally derived from hijra discourse/practice (Cohen 2006) – they do not necessarily accept the moral logics dictating their insertion into this social landscape and the economies of care outlined by Rakesh in the earlier vignette. Drawing on such differential constructions of sexuality, stigma, respect and the need for care, this chapter explores the fraught deployments of the signifiers ‘MSM’, ‘kothi’ and ‘hijra’ in Hyderabad, and their increasingly complex and fluid circulations within the semantic fields of AIDS and sexual rights discourses. In the altered landscape of post-AIDS enterprise India – what Lawrence Cohen refers to in

a recent article as ‘AIDS Cosmopolitanism’, i.e. ‘an imagined formation of dislocated agents using the economically fortified enterprise of AIDS prevention to support its own covert agendas’ (2006: 271) – it is these kinds of friction between and among such frameworks that reveal their complex genealogies and the moral logics of self and other making in the contemporary sexual terrain of India. Reflecting on these kinds of tension, Cohen ends his article with an interesting question: ‘What kind of ethics and what kind of care are possible and likely under contingent instances of particular global conjunctures?’ (2006: 301). In this chapter, I engage this question/issue – the ethics and politics of care – addressing how these play out in the lives of hijras, deeply implicated and simultaneously marginalised as they are in the terrain of AIDS cosmopolitanism. Specifically, I refract this question through the plural and particular logics at play between the cosmopolitanisms of hijras and their public health interlocutors in Hyderabad. I argue that the seeming ineffectiveness of existing health programmes, translated in hijras’ understanding to a lack of care, needs to be understood through several dialectical tensions – between emerging definitions of hijras as rights-bearing sexual minorities and their continued representations as stigmatised social figures, between local moral economies of izzat (respect) and sharm (shame), and between representations of self and other in terms of sexual and asexual difference.