Deviant Domesticities and Sexualised Childhoods: Prostitutes, Eunuchs and the Limits of the State Child “Rescue” Mission in Colonial India

Hinchy, Jessica

doi:10.22459/dd.10.2014.09

Cited by 6 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Anti-trafficking interventions would see M's break from her natal family and husband as an unmitigated loss of kinship, to be remedied by "rescue" and repatriation back home. This mistaken understanding inadvertently reinforces the hegemony of the heterosexual conjugal family, and reproduces a colonial logic criminalizing other forms of patronage-based kinship (Freitag 1991;Hinchy 2014) Over the years, M had quite consciously disinvested in relationships with biological family and male partners, investing instead in brothel-based kin networks. Despite her violent introduction to brothel life, eventually her brothel-keeper became something of an ally, allowing her to wait until she was ready to start sex work, and helping her to save money and earn quite well.…”

Section: Ethnography Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theorizing the Continuities Between Marriage and Sex Work in the Experience of Female Sex Workers in Pune, Maharashtra

Nataraj

Majumdar

2021

Social Sciences

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Marriage is near-universal in India, where most cisgender women sex workers have been married at some point in their lives, while also navigating responsibilities to family and children. In this paper, we explore how cisgender women sex workers in Pune, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, experience continuities between sex work and marriage, while navigating an ideological landscape where sex work and marriage are positioned as opposites. Returning to feminist theoretical models that highlight the economic underpinnings of marriage, we outline three arenas in the Indian context where marriage and sex work overlap rather than remaining opposed and separate entities: (a) migration, (b) attributions of respect and stigma, coded through symbols of marriage and sexual availability, and (c) building and dissolving kinship networks that contest the primacy of biological or affinal kin. In each of these realms the distinction between marriage and sex work is a fraught and contested issue, and the roles of wife, mother, and sex worker can shade into one another based on context. We then examine how three women navigate these contradictions, arguing that focusing on kinship and marriage can circumvent the limitations of the choice versus coercion paradigm that structures current debates on sex work.

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Section: Ethnography Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Theorizing the Continuities Between Marriage and Sex Work in the Experience of Female Sex Workers in Pune, Maharashtra

Nataraj

Majumdar

2021

Social Sciences

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“…Other studies have expanded the scope of how and where we might think about Indian homes (see Banerjee, 2010; Hinchy, 2014: 251). Some women rejected Indian National Congress’s Gandhian non-violence and used their homes to support revolutionary internationalism, socialist nationalism or Congress-affiliated but non-Gandhian forms of more radical protest, including armed raids, arson and sabotage during the Quit India movement (Raghavan, 1999).…”

Section: Carceral Mobility Madness and Un-archived Colonial Homesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A final and especially pertinent example has been explored by Jessica Hinchy as part of her broader research into India’s hijra communities (defined as born-male “emasculates” who assumed feminine identities, Hinchy, 2014: 248). Concerns that the community was abducting boys, introducing them to sodomy, and raising them in effective brothels led to powers being passed in 1871 to remove children from hijra households.…”

Section: Carceral Mobility Madness and Un-archived Colonial Homesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carceral and colonial domesticities: Subaltern case geographies of a Delhi rescue home

Legg

2023

Environ Plan D

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This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.

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“…The criminalisation of hijra kinship, which entails hijras leaving their natal families to join hijra gharanas, often when they are still legal minors, can also be traced to anxieties in colonial policing and governance. One of the reasons why hijras had been added to the list of criminal tribes under colonial rule was that hijras were suspected of kidnapping young boys and forcibly castrating them to make them join hijra communities (Hinchy 2017(Hinchy , 2014aJaffrey 1996;Nataraj 2017). Whether this suspicion of kidnapping was the cunning of state recognition of hijra kinship and/or corporeality is not discernible, but what is apparent is that while the hijras' appearance in discourses of nationalism is new, the suspicion towards their body and communities still frames them as a threat to the state.…”

Section: Challamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This failure of imagination explained their aspiration and ambitions to remove children from hijras in order for hijras to 'die out'. Another reason for the failure of colonial policing was the ability of hijras to evade arrests because of their membership and participation in travelling theatre troupes that put up religious drama across the country (Hinchy 2014b;Preston 1987). 7 In this context, the departure of new forms of legislation is significant in that the state discursively frames itself as having an aspiration to undo precisely this genealogy of wrongdoing.…”

Section: Cease and Desistmentioning

confidence: 99%

Begging for change: Hijras, law and nationalism

Saria

2019

Contributions to Indian Sociology

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This article begins by examining multiple drafts of a parliamentary legislation that aims to provide rights and reservations to transgender persons in India, so as to trace the ways in which hijras have been absorbed into the discourse of nationalism. The most current draft of this bill, ‘The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016’ shows that despite claims to protect transgender citizens, the state uses the discourse of nationalism to justify the increased governmentalisation of hijra bodies and lives. I bring attention to the state’s insistence on the distance between homosexuals and hijras and the active endorsement of Sexual Reassignment Surgery to argue that the legislations are consolidating heterosexuality rather than making space for queer citizens. The project of heterosexualisation marks the disjuncture between colonial and contemporary ambitions of policing hijras, which have remained remarkably consistent and centred around their economic activity of begging. Based on ethnographic research conducted in rural Odisha, I question the glossing of hijras’ practice of seeking alms or challa as begging, to show how limits of nationalism are drawn and render hijra forms of being as incommensurable with the state.

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Deviant Domesticities and Sexualised Childhoods: Prostitutes, Eunuchs and the Limits of the State Child “Rescue” Mission in Colonial India

Cited by 6 publications

References 1 publication

Theorizing the Continuities Between Marriage and Sex Work in the Experience of Female Sex Workers in Pune, Maharashtra

Theorizing the Continuities Between Marriage and Sex Work in the Experience of Female Sex Workers in Pune, Maharashtra

Carceral and colonial domesticities: Subaltern case geographies of a Delhi rescue home

Begging for change: Hijras, law and nationalism

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