Towards Corporeal Cosmopolitanism by Raghavan Anjana;

Author:Raghavan, Anjana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4940707
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Unlimited Model

THIRUNANGAI REPRESENTATIONS AND NARRATIVES IN TAMIL NADU

In recent years, India, and consequently Indian media, has seen a small but marked focus on rights and legislation regarding the body and sexual rights. Much of this media attention has been sensationalist, insensitive and sometimes dangerous to victims of gender and sexual violence. But some of it has been productive and important. The thirunangai community in South India, especially Tamil Nadu, has also been a part of this media attention. The voices of protest and resistance, and the right to be visible, have been reflected in media presence, though moulded within specific narratives, often of sensationalism and exoticisation. The media representation of transwomen in India, and Tamil Nadu, could be cited as a popular cosmopolitan narrative, in that it denotes a certain kind of visibility and acceptance. However, as we shall see, this visibility is riddled with problems and multiple kinds of discrimination. Thirunangais, as previously discussed, have held a Janus-faced ritual/religious status in Indian society, and their ritual liminality is directly connected with their bodies and sexualities. Revered, reviled and feared, all at once, the lived realities of this community pose a direct and significant challenge to the ideological framework of cosmopolitanism, which seeks to establish a community and set of ethics built on humanness. For the thirunangai community, the question of personhood and what constitutes being human in terms of maleness and femaleness is a deeply fissured and painful one. Although the Supreme Court has legally recognised the right of thirunangais/transwomen to lead equal lives, there is, as discussed earlier, no indication that there is an understanding of what gender nonconformist personhood actually means. This suggests that the constitutional inclusion of transwomen has been as exceptions, rather than as norms.

I want to begin with two examples from television media, which I broadly identify as being part of the popular cosmopolitan narrative of transgender representation. I want to emphasise here that I use popular cosmopolitanism as a reference to the popular, cultural understanding of what cosmopolitanism means in an everyday sense. In common parlance, cosmopolitanism conveys a sense of modernity, globalisation, diverse populations, an acceptance of transgressions, high fashion, access to English media, Western consumption practices and a kind of ubiquitous urban equality that advanced capitalism confers upon us all. These everyday understandings of cosmopolitanism are not unconnected to its political/philosophical articulation, and I would venture to argue that liberal cosmopolitan narratives like those of Beck, Delanty and even Appiah (see chapter one), are fairly compatible with the popular understanding of cosmopolitanism. In this context, these media narratives of transwomen serve as powerful illustrations of how cosmopolitanism – as a kitsch phenomenon in popular and Western media cultures – has clearly influenced and induced what are routinely perceived to be extremely conservative and repressive political and media cultures to open up and challenge existing norms and morals governing gender and sexual identity. The two television narratives I discuss were both talk shows on Tamil media channels. The first was titled Ippadikku Rose

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