Performing (Trans)Woman Identity through Nirvana: A Study of Hijra Life Narratives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper extensively studies the significance of nirvana in the lives of hijra transwomen at the personal, social as well as cultural levels. Life writings of hijras from India so far published in English are taken as the primary source of study. Hijras constitute one of the uniquely organised transgender communities worldwide, with a distinct historical legacy and sociocultural characteristics of their own. Nirvana, in the hijra parlance, refers to the shedding of male genital organs and attainment of (trans)woman’s body through castration coupled with an elaborate set of rituals. It plays an eminent role in authenticating hijra identity by the virtue of its corporeal visibility and ritualistic connotations. Castration, the core treatment in gender-affirmation or sex reassignment surgery, happens to be the crucially inevitable procedure in nirvana process. Hijra life narratives document their innate desire and anxiety for nirvana, preparations for sex reassignment surgery with community support, painful and brutal experience of surviving castration surgery, postoperative care and rituals within the hijra community, and ultimate pleasure of attaining nirvana. This paper employs Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity, and the interconnectedness between biological sex and social gender to investigate the lived experiences of hijras for unearthing the significance of nirvana. The study concludes that nirvana becomes an agency for resisting oppression and stigma for the hijra transwomen. It further establishes how nirvana authenticates their (trans)womanhood, while also bestowing them with the power to bless others with fertility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".