ABSTRACT
Margaret Trawick has pointed out some of the complexities of transvestism in South India:
Transvestism among men is very common, and even 'normal' boys can get away with dressing up like girls, just for fun, and learn to move their bodies in convincingly female ways. Siva is a hermaphrodite; pictures of Krishna make him look like a girl. Does this mean that masculine and feminine are not valid categories to South Indian people? Are the women who plow or the men who dress up as women questioning the essential opposition between male and female? No. ... We might consider the proliferation of androgyny there to be one aspect of a pleasure in sexuality in its original polymorphous nature that we ourselves miss, together with an intellectual enjoyment of paradox, which, also, we fail to share. This is not to say that sexual oppression, and repression, do not occur in India. But too often, this is all that ethnographers seeY
These myths may express a desire that transcends both sex and gender, a desire that desires the mind no matter what bits of flesh may be appended to various parts of the body. Moreover, they remind us of two truths in tension, a paradox: one Hindu view of gender makes it as easy to slough off as a pair of pants (or a dress), but this view is often challenged by myths in which skin is more than skin deep, in which the mind and the memory, too, are gendered, an intrinsic part of the mortal coil that is not quite so easily shuffled off.
