Utopia Interrupted: Indian Sex/Gender Dissident Activism and the Everyday Search for a Life Worth Living

(Un)democratic Epicene Pronouns in Asian Englishes: A Register Approach

“…The dichotomous approach to gender, differentiating only male and female speakers, represents a simplification of reality and excludes speakers who associate with a third gender, such as the hijras in India. Nonetheless, because this religious group has only gained democratic rights recently (2009, according to Osella 2017:241, as seen in 2.2), they are highly unlikely to have been informants in the compilation of ICE-IND, which took place in the 1990s and which stipulated that authors and speakers had to have been educated through the medium of English (according to the ICE compilation criteria). Other gender identities not culturally recognized in India and Hong Kong might, however, have been included in ICE corpora without proper labeling.…”

“…We have many reports of sexual harassment, of the difficulties for women of renting property and living without a man or family. (Osella 2017:230)…”

“…Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that all these approximations to gender equality in Asia are made from a western perspective, while the true gender picture in Asia is in fact far more complex, as seen, for example, in the challenge to binary gender represented by Indian hijras, a religious community of individuals who embody male and female characteristics, who prefer to be referred to in the feminine gender, and who belong to an institutionalized third gender (Nanda 1999:ix-xiv). In addition, in 2009 a third gender (beyond the male/female distinction) was made available on ballot forms by the Indian election commission (Osella 2017:241). Thus, any working sociological description of gender equality in these Asian territories can only be taken to be superficial, as a means of contextualizing the possible role of social forces in the use of democratic epicene pronouns.…”