Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) has been read as a narrative of the innumerable violences of the modern nation state told from the point of view of the marginalized. Of greater interest to this chapter is the novel’s elucidation of the exclusion, trauma, and precarious positioning of the Hijras in post-colonial India through the character of Anjum, an intersexed individual, whose portrayal transgresses all sorts of binaries and boundaries at the heart of patriarchal systems of meaning-making. The character of Anjum straddles the conventional gender dichotomy and thereby opens spaces to consider the vulnerability, fluidity, and arbitrariness of both sex and gender, especially that of masculinity, which is the gender subjectivity she is forced to perform. Drawing on intersex and transgender theoretical perspectives and the critical concepts of borderland and third space, this chapter highlights the remarkable malleability of the intersexed body, which unsettles rigid binaries that inform our perception of the world. In Roy’s novel, the third space between “everything and nothing” symbolized by the intersexed body carries the subversive potential to contest dominant sex-gender binaries, open new spaces of critical consciousness, and invite new and different ways of “seeing” and “being”.

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Hyphenated Bodies, Disassociated Masculinities: Configurations of Sex and Gender in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

  • Thilini N. K. Meegaswatta

摘要

Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) has been read as a narrative of the innumerable violences of the modern nation state told from the point of view of the marginalized. Of greater interest to this chapter is the novel’s elucidation of the exclusion, trauma, and precarious positioning of the Hijras in post-colonial India through the character of Anjum, an intersexed individual, whose portrayal transgresses all sorts of binaries and boundaries at the heart of patriarchal systems of meaning-making. The character of Anjum straddles the conventional gender dichotomy and thereby opens spaces to consider the vulnerability, fluidity, and arbitrariness of both sex and gender, especially that of masculinity, which is the gender subjectivity she is forced to perform. Drawing on intersex and transgender theoretical perspectives and the critical concepts of borderland and third space, this chapter highlights the remarkable malleability of the intersexed body, which unsettles rigid binaries that inform our perception of the world. In Roy’s novel, the third space between “everything and nothing” symbolized by the intersexed body carries the subversive potential to contest dominant sex-gender binaries, open new spaces of critical consciousness, and invite new and different ways of “seeing” and “being”.