Transgender in Indian Context: Rights and Activism
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FOREWORD
Sri Dipak Giri, a serious research scholar, has been laboriously
editing scholarly books for the last few years, on various issues, and the
latest is on transgender studies, which is a fresh new area in Indian
academics. The addition of the subtitle, which refers to the activism in the
Indian soil , makes it both informative and investigative, indicating the
passion of Sri Giri to be with the current always and to be collaborative in a
gesture to present for us his best possible material in a challenging new
field.
Despite debates on the subtle differences among
the terms relating to Gender and Sexuality, transgender falls within the broad
stream of the “Queer”. Although the discipline owes its birth to Michael
Foucault, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, the term
queer, often considered as transgender’s evil twin, was
first used in Teresa de Lauretis’s 1991 work in the feminist cultural
studies journal differences entitled
“Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities.” She explores her coinage to indicate
that there are allied topics involved within this discipline, deconstructing
the traditional mistake of calling heterosexuality as an index of sexual
habits. It was a challenge to the notion that lesbian and gay studies formed an
identical branch of study. Further, it stressed on the various ways that race
shaped sexual bias. De Lauretis suggests that queer theory could
unite all of these critiques together to open up new researches on sexuality.
There was a time when the transsexuals were
regarded as abominable beings in most feminist and gay or lesbian discourses.
Today, there is arising a growing need in the transsexual people, as they have
acquired the more sophisticated name transgender, to articulate new
subjectivisation of the self that truly expresses the reality of transgender
crises. In this context, Giri’s book, which is a collection of essays by expert
hands, will be quite useful both as a humanitarian statement demanding serious
attention in society and also as a reference text in the humanities departments.
In the context of the approaching age of Sri
Aurobindo, the “flawed being” cannot be a static reality. Until that reversible
reality envisaged by the master in his “The Destiny of the Body” and other
texts relating to the transformation of the body, reaches the masses, the
efforts taken by critics like Giri and his team are welcome.
Goutam
Ghosal, D. Litt.,
Professor,
Department
of English
Visva-Bharati,
Santiniketan
West
Bengal