ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a queer reading of the hijra in terms of the subversive possibilities and limits such individuals pose to established modes of thinking about gender binaries. It analyses the hijra alongside that of the much discussed and debated western figure of the drag queen. However, a comparative analysis of the hijra versus the drag queen does not mean advocating the critical meaningfulness of the one over the other. The chapter relocates both of these cultural models as potentially destabilizing to contemporary understandings of gendered and sexed identities. It discusses the notion of gender as performance as a transcultural "tool" for dismantling rigidities of the masculine/feminine divide. All hijras stress the notion of impotence as a prerequisite for joining the community and an eventual surgical emasculation for the attainment of divine and physical power. Castration and penectomy are widely practiced as an inevitable requisite for becoming a hijra.
