“Like a City Ablaze”: The Third Sex and the Creation of Sexuality in Jain Religious Literature

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates that Jain thinkers, living and writing long before the modern era and in a socio-cultural context very different from our own, developed a full-fledged conception of sexuality that meets the criteria: sexuality is often, but not invariably, linked to gender nonconformity and biological sex. The acceptance of the category of a third sex has been a part of the Indian worldview for nearly three thousand years. The concept took form during the late Vedic period on the basis of observed male gender-role nonconformity. Men who were impotent, did not impregnate women, were effeminate, or transvestite, were regarded as napumsaka , literally "not-a-male," that is, unmale. Indian speculation on the characteristics by which a person can be identified as belonging to one of the three sexes arose in the context of examining the relationship between natural gender or sex, and grammatical gender.

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