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Showing posts with label Transgender in Indian Context: Rights and Activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Transgender in Indian Context: Rights and Activism. Show all posts

Transgender in Indian Context: Rights and Activism


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 twinwas 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