Mediating hijra in/visibility: the affective economy of value-coding marginality in South Asia

Abstract

Hijras comprise a visible yet marginalized subcultural community of gender-variant female-identifying individuals in post-colonial South Asia. Hijras have survived their marginalization through community formation and other discursive strategies. Their survival strategies include peculiar gestures such as clap of the hollow palms. The hollow clap and other discursive strategies are not only integral to hijra communitarian system and identity formation but also help them negotiate their position in the mainstream society. However, a visibility politics conflated with logics of neoliberalism and supported by infrastructures of racial capitalism seeks to repurpose hijra clap and value-code their marginality for consumption as ideas for change. This approach is exemplified in an awareness campaign titled #ChangeTheClap, launched from Pakistan by a transnational not-for-profit organization. This article foregrounds the significance of gestures, which is usually shoved into background or obscurity, and analyzes the affective campaign and critiques its visibility politics that functions to create hierarchies of value in favor of sanitized, rehabilitated, and respectable bodies.

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