Demystifying Trans Narratives: Gender in Post Modern India

Abstract

Demystifying Trans Narratives: Gender in Post Modern India attempts to demystify the term ‘Trans Narrative’ and introduce transgender autobiographies to both the gender marginalized as well as the mainstream heteronormative society. It is a study of the autobiographies of three transgender writers across India and attempts to focus on a renewed narratology in relation to self and body in these narratives. The omittance of trans narratives from mainstream society have functioned as an act of silencing nonconforming genders since these unconventional literatures threaten to destabilize the neat binaries of male/female and masculine/feminine. The study analyses three autobiographies by three transgender writers, namely, Laxminarayan Tripathi’s Me Hijra Me Laxmi (2015), A. Revathi’s Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story (2010) and Living Smile Vidya’s I am Vidya (2007) and focuses on the so-called unnarratable in these narratives. By unnarratable it refers to those narratives which should not be told or mentioned because of the prevailing social conventions. During the Victorian Era, sex and private self was always the unnarratable whereas in the contemporary era, it’s same-sex desire and sex change. Hence by euphemism, illusion, metaphor, and metonymy, such tabooed subjects which cannot be narrated are signified.