Outgrowing the Authentic: Mapping Cultural (Un)Intelligibility through Performance in Me Hijra, Me Laxmi

The composition of transgender identity through narrating self is a critical feature of transgender autobiographies. The soul trapped in a body attempt to cross over to the other side of the binary gender system. This dream “materialising” into reality is a milestone in the creation of a hijra identity. However, the wrong body discourses facilitate a sanction to the essentialist binary system of gender. With the advent of the sociocultural aspect of gender identity formation, some of the hijras have taken up a more progressive step towards voicing their identity. Mapping a newer self by performing against the set notion of hijra ghettos might create a less intelligible identity, an identity susceptible to abjection. Nonetheless, it widens the “Open Normativities” space to flow and take an intelligible space in the long run. The autobiography, Me Hijra, Me Laxmi (2015) by Laxmi Narayan Tripathi is one of its kind in the literature from wrong body discourses as she is against the essentialism imbued by the clan. How she masquerades hyperbolic femininity subverts the heteronormative notion of gender through the continuous reiteration of performance and reflects the imitative structure of all genders. Hence, this paper aims to explore a historical shift in the formation of transgender identity through performance. Understanding this shift embarks the transgression of a transgender in the truest sense. Furthermore, the paper explores this shift by borrowing the major theoretical underpinning of “cultural intelligibility” from Judith Butler’s work Gender Trouble (1990). This paper will also examine how transgressive performances lead to the formation of “Open Normativities” and create counterpublic discourses.