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What is wonderful about this book is the originality of Reddy’s ethnography. She significantly advances—really, transforms—discussions that until now were largely dependent on less comprehensive work. With Respect to Sex will reframe entirely the dominant conversation on hijra identity, which has seen it as being reducible to gender. This is an important book that will be read and reread by a broad range of scholars.
Lawrence Cohen
With Respect to Sex extends the theoretical context of work on gender in precisely the right direction, moving away from the idea of alternative genders as rigid categories and viewing them instead as multiple identities. Reddy’s deep and intimate ethnography makes this book an important contribution to the discipline of anthropology and to gender studies more generally.
Serena Nanda
In an important, intimate, rich and eminently readable ethnography, Gayatri Reddy creates a portrait of a community of hijras in Hyderabad that suggests that one cannot see hijras simply through the lens of gender and sexual difference because that is not how hijras understand themselves. Tracing their presence from an era of Hyderabadi royal patronage to the shifting social and cultural landscapes of modernity and nationalism and finally to contemporary neo-liberalism, Reddy shows the ever-changing, complicated and multi-faceted matrix of class, caste, religion, and regional identities and practices that underlie hijra understandings of both their identity and their difference. At stake, she says, are questions of nationalism, citizenship, identity, religion, class, sex, and economics.
ISBN: 8190363468,9788190363464
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Pages : 328
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