Troubling bodies: ‘eunuchs,’ masculinity and impotence in colonial North India

Abstract

This article considers colonial masculinity from the margins, examining two groups of sexual, gender and caste subalterns classified as ‘eunuchs,’ the hijra and zenana. From the 1850s, several moral panics concerning eunuchs occurred in the official circles of northern India, culminating in the registration of eunuchs under Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) of 1871. Masculinity was crucial to the historical marginalization of hijras and zenanas, who challenged binary gender, with hijras often describing themselves as ‘neither men nor women.’ These groups were labelled as ‘men,’ only to be stigmatized as failures of masculinity, in order to erase their embodied difference and socio-cultural identity. I analyse the colonial government's attempts to precisely define and control eunuch deviance, as well as the ambivalences of this project. In particular, this article analyses the definition of the ‘eunuch’ as an ‘impotent man.’ The determination of potency provides a case study for the analysis of medical understandings of masculinity and the contested authority of medical knowledge of sexuality within the broader colonial project. This article concludes by considering the response of hijras and zenanas to the CTA, in particular their articulation of communal and gendered identity.

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