Negotiating Modernity: NGO Interventions and the Transformation of Hijra Families in South India

• In Event: New Directions in the Sociology of Development: Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Development discourse often positions families as harmful for young cisgender women, especially in the global South. In India, NGOs make similar claims about gender non-conforming hijras’ families, asserting that they harm younger hijras. To what extent are such interpretations related to understandings about modernity and the place that families occupy in the lives of individuals? How do these ideas impact hijra responses to such criticism? Through a case study of 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork (including over 75 interviews) with hijras and staff members of a large NGO in Bangalore, I show NGO staff express tensions between ideas about modernity and traditional support structures as they critique and intervene into hijra families. Younger gender non-conforming people were recently included within discourses of opportunity in urban India. I find NGO staff position hijra family relationships as threatening these opportunities, pushing them to intervene into hijra relationships. This unsurprisingly builds resistance from senior hijras, who assert their traditions in a modern way: by creating a formal NGO that operates through their traditional structures. Rather than rejecting or celebrating these interventions into hijra families, I use qualitative methods to emphasize the enduring power of ideas about modernity in the lives of marginalized groups.

Author

• Liz Mount, Texas Tech University