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Introduction
The spatial arrangements of a house are ‘always already’ gendered. As the smallest unit of a heteronormative society, the house designates specific spaces to its male and female members, establishing fixed roles associated with reproduction, childcare, and family maintenance. While female members may experience these domestic spaces as restrictive and inconvenient, how might a trans individual feel in such a setting? Do trans individuals have a space of their own within a house designed and sustained by cisnormative values?
The central aim of this study is to identify trans domestic spaces, seeking to understand how trans domesticity is currently configured and how it might be transformed to facilitate inclusive and meaningful trans dwelling. By examining Indian Anglophone Trans Autobiographical Narratives through the lens of trans domesticity, this study interrogates contested ideas of gender, sex, sexuality, education, and social bonding within the context of trans households. It purposefully situates Indian trans lives indoors—away from public streets, buildings, protests, and pride marches—to advance Indian trans studies by foregrounding the often-overlooked dimensions of trans domestic life.
Theorizing Trans Domesticity
The Latin roots of the word “domestic” (domesticus; domus) evoke a state of belonging to the home or household. As a concept, domesticity encompasses material, psychological, spiritual, gendered, social, cultural, and political dimensions within the context of everyday human relationships, both inside and beyond the house. The house offers insights not only into an inhabitant’s inner self but also into their (inclusive pronoun) household dynamics, political contexts, sociological ideologies, and everyday cultural performances. It acts as an interface between the private and the public, the psychological and the physical, the familial and the communal, and the modern and traditional. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, explores the phenomenological significance of the house, wherein attics, cellars, doors, windows, hearths, drawers, corners, and nooks serve as subtle yet powerful signifiers of an inhabitant’s intimate being and aspirations. He states:
The house, quite obviously, is a privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside space, provided, of course, that we take it in both its unity and its complexity, and endeavour to integrate all the special values in one fundamental value (Bachelard 3).
For Bachelard, the house is an intimate space where memories are localised. To systematically study these intimate spaces, where compressed time resides, he introduces a methodology termed ‘Topoanalysis’ (Bachelard 37). Martin Heidegger’s ontological theorisation of dwelling posits that humans build and think through their lived connection with the “fourfold” (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals). He asserts that human beings essentially build to dwell. For Heidegger, dwelling is an inherent space that liberates its inhabitants and fosters meaningful growth.
However, Henri Lefebvre (1974) critiques the perspectives of Bachelard and Heidegger, disputing their portrayal of the house as an absolute space and challenging their fixation on it. Drawing on Marxist and materialist approaches, Lefebvre argues that the house must not be read in isolation. Instead, it should be understood within the broader context of urban modernity. He emphasises that the house, as a social practice, must be analysed alongside other elements of social space, such as “public buildings and palaces” (Lefebvre 168), to enable a simultaneous consideration of all aspects of a social object. This simultaneity, according to Lefebvre, archives and represents the temporal sequence of social space alongside its constituent social practices. Thus, the house should be interpreted as part of an integrated social space encompassing both place and time. Mary Douglas (1991) characterises domestic space as “inexorable and absurd” (Douglas 287), describing the house as a “tangle of conventions and totally incommensurable rights and duties” (Douglas 289), wherein even its “most altruistic and successful versions exert a tyrannous control over mind and body” (Douglas 289). Verschaffel (2002), in the context of domesticity and femininity, elucidates how domesticity perpetuates everyday hierarchies:
The house is a device for articulating differences and defining a hierarchy in the meanings one lives by. The house is the place where order is protected and restored when things start wandering around or haphazardly mix, without rules (Verschaffel 287).
Theorisation of domesticity in relation to femininity has been undertaken by prominent critics such as Nicholson (1932), Livett (1942), Cohen (2006), and Reed (2009), among others. However, trans domesticity arguably remains an underexplored area, despite its significance in shaping ideologies, labelling identities, and reinforcing stereotypical roles. Seelman (2015) observes:
Family conflicts and rejection are common issues encountered by transgender people. Such situations put them at greater risk for abuse … In the National Transgender Discrimination Survey conducted by the Task Force and NCTE (the same dataset analyzed in the present study), about 19% of respondents reported experiencing domestic violence by a family member because of being transgender or gender non-conforming. This rate would likely be even higher when including domestic violence that was not perceived as being related to one’s gender (Seelman 8-9).
Trans individuals are more likely to inhabit unwelcoming domestic spaces, and broad data collected in official documents often fails to capture their lived experiences within households. In the Indian context, clinical psychologist Hemangi Mhaprolkar notes:
Parents of transgender individuals tend to be in denial. They feel that this can’t be happening to their children. There is shame associated with the issue. They are concerned about what others will say or whether society will accept their child at all (qtd in Athreye).
No matter how gendered the spatial arrangements of a house are, they remain structured for male-female inhabitants within a heteronormative society. Consequently, queer domesticity is rendered invisible and largely unexamined, necessitating academic scrutiny for representation, problematisation, and theorisation.
Significant contributions to the study of queer domesticity include those by Cook (2014), Gorman-Murray and Cook (2018), Vider (2022), and Davis (2023). While theorising queer households is relatively recent, queer individuals have always been part of domestic spaces and household dynamics. Typically born into heteronormative homes, they spend their formative years in environments structured and regulated by male-female interactions. For queer children or adolescents, a queer domestic space often remains a desired or imagined concept until they achieve financial independence to create and maintain one of their own. Cook (2014), in discussing male-male couples in London, highlights how queer domesticity was historically excluded from legal recognition:
[…] a law society memo nevertheless declared in the 1950s that ‘male persons living together do not constitute domestic life’. Without a wife, without children to support, what could domestic life be for such men? […] Section 28 of the Local Government Act declared two years later that such homosexual households could only be ‘pretend’ (Cook 3).
Despite Cook’s significant analysis of queer households, his focus primarily pertains to queer adults who own a house, however disempowering the space may be. Queering the Interior (2020) by Gorman-Murray and Cook offers scholarly insights into the queer interiors of domestic life and the domesticity of queer interiority, with a particular emphasis on ‘the Global North’ (Gorman-Murray and Cook 2). They argue for the importance of studying trans domesticity specifically:
The domestic interior is a way of simultaneously fitting in and standing out, and provides a means for the queerly identified individual to couch and present their difference while also showing a conventional investment in the culturally central space of the home (Gorman-Murray and Cook 1).
Queer domesticity, whether operating within or beyond normative spatial arrangements, is ideally fluid, reflecting the shifting beliefs, desires, bonds, senses of belonging, affiliations, and identities of its inhabitants. However, the level of agency within queer domesticity is often shaped by factors such as: “availability of money and the degree of domestic authority to spend it; proximity to, distance from and position within family; avowed political or religious affiliation; the relationship to or use of the figurative and actual space of the closet; and of course the complicatedly configured lived realities associated with class, race and gender” (Gorman-Murray and Cook 2). Vider (2021) examines LGBTQ homes to reconsider domestic practices that shape American culture and politics. He articulates the productive domestic anxieties of the LGBTQ people:
From the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement in the 1950s through the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, LGBTQ activists mobilized home as a site of creative tension between integration and resistance: they adapted, challenged, and reshaped domestic conventions at the same time they reaffirmed the home as a privileged site of intimate, communal, and national belonging (Vider 3).
Vider (2021) delves into the everyday practices, privileges, and rights of LGBTQ individuals, focusing on how these were secured through domestic spaces in American cities such as New York and San Francisco. In these urban centres, resistance to non-inclusive architectural planning and the capitalist influences on households fostered innovative modes of community development and care, with a particular emphasis on domesticity. LGBTQ homemaking—one of the most neglected areas of LGBTQ studies—has been pivotal in shaping understandings of identity, sexuality, kinship, and community (Vider, 5). The slogan “Out of the closets, into the streets,” while a powerful call to action, implicitly rejects and thus overlooks academic inquiry into LGBTQ private spaces. Vider (2021) seeks to unearth and analyse the queerness of home:
Home, I argue, has been a crucial though contradictory space in LGBTQ life and politics—a site of constraint and a site of self-expression, a site of isolation and a site of deep connection, a site of secrecy and a site of recognition. This history not only disrupts now-standard narratives of LGBTQ history but also alters understandings of the meanings and functions of domestic space in American culture more broadly, revealing the home for its perverse contradictions as a normative structure (Vider 7).
This ground-breaking study is acknowledged by Davis (2023), who, in a recent review, highlights Vider’s focus on the everyday domestic rights and practices of LGBTQ individuals, which are often supported and upheld by the state. The interplay between literature and domestic spaces is also significant: literature not only reflects the intimate spaces of homes and their dynamics but also incorporates architectural and domestic terminology, as seen in genres such as “closet dramas, gothic novels, drawing-room comedies, kitchen sink dramas, locked room detective stories, country house poems and novels, domestic novels, Aga sagas, and postmodernism” (Briganti and Mezei, 321).
In this context, the present study argues that trans domesticity represents a pivotal site for exploring the everyday lived and imagined experiences of trans individuals. Indian Anglophone trans autobiographies, such as those by A. Revathi, Manobi Bandyopadhyay, Kalki Subramaniam, and Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, play a vital role in illuminating the profound and complex significance of houses in the lives of trans writers.
Why Indian Anglophone Trans Autobiographical Narratives?
Autobiography serves as a meaningful way to represent the human condition as both lived and desired. However, as a tool for understanding the often elusive self, autobiography requires careful problematisation. Gusdorf (1980) defines autobiographical narratives as expressions of identity, asserting that they are written with the conviction that “I count, my existence is significant to the world, and my death will leave the world incomplete” (Gusdorf 29). Freeman (2016) interprets this observation as reflecting the narrator’s intent to show “how things happen—how they always occur, given the eternal order of things—but how they happened, the operative presumption being that we can tell a cogent, believable, perhaps even true story of how the present came to be by looking backward and situating the movement of events within a more or less coherent narrative form” (Freeman 122). Thus, autobiography is written with the conviction that the life of the narrator matters, wherein the commitment to self-understanding and self-representation is almost revolutionary:
This telling, rather than being a reproduction of the past “as it was,” is more appropriately understood as a “creative redescription” of the past (Hacking, 1995; Kearney, 2002) and is part and parcel of the narrative dimension that is intrinsic to any and all forms of autobiographical understanding. And it is this narrative dimension that can open the way toward not only a more capacious conceptualization of truth but a more adequate and humane framework for exploring the human realm (Freeman 137).
The narrative dimension of autobiography, with its creative redescription, is so potent that Nelson and Fivush (2020) identify language and narrative as a key interface between the internal and external worlds, helping to “create a sense of extended self through time that has experienced and reflexively evaluated these events” (Fivush 91). Mary Evans (1993) considers autobiography as a ‘feminist project’ (Evans 5) to uncover the hidden lives of women. She looks at the genre as a meaningful mode of writing back by noting, ‘When individuals write autobiographies, they often locate themselves as people who have a battle against a particular culture’ (Evans 13). In this context, trans autobiography provides a significant window into the everyday human conditions of trans individuals as lived and imagined. The genre reflects an autobiographical consciousness of the trans self, conditioned by both external and internal worlds. Significant research has been conducted using trans autobiographies as primary sources to identify and interpret trans identity formations and constructions. For example, Ramsay (2022) analyses two trans autobiographies, Conundrum: An Extraordinary Narrative of Transsexualism by Jan Morris (1974) and Nina Here nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender by Nick Krieger (2011), in order to study and understand trans selves as social constructs across different Western historical contexts. While critical studies of Indian Anglophone trans autobiographies aimed at revealing embedded signs of articulation and resistance are not entirely unique, situating everyday trans domesticity within these narratives offers a novel approach. This study serves as a potent tool not only to understand how Indian trans lives are but also how they could be.
Reading Domesticity in Indian Anglophone Trans Autobiographical Narratives
This study examines selected Indian Anglophone autobiographical narratives—We Are Not the Others (2021) by Kalki Subramaniam, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story (2010) and A Life in Trans Activism (2016) by A. Revathi, A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi (2017) by Manobi Bandhopadhyay, and Me Hijra, Me Lakshmi (2015) and Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life (2016) by Laxminarayan Tripathi — to uncover the everyday lives of the narrators within the context of trans domesticity. The study employs three literary motifs — gender, sex and sexuality; education; and social bonding—to explore whether trans inhabitants have a room of their own. An individual’s biological sex, gender identity and sexual orientation are identified, classified, and stereotyped within the domestic space. In a normative household space, a trans person finds it difficult to understand, express, negotiate, or/and cope with the complex relationship between ‘their’ own sexual identity and sexuality and the gender constructs imposed upon them. The spatial arrangements — ‘always already’ designed, managed, and perpetuated for male-female roles — become contested spaces where the relationships and performances of sex, sexuality and gender are strategically invisibilised and left unquestioned by the male and female members of society. In all the narratives, trans domestic spaces turn into sites of conflict and anxiety, albeit to varying degrees.
The Indian (misogynistic) preference for male children often leads to the double marginalisation of a trans child, who begins to feel isolated and vulnerable upon realising that their biological sex and sexuality are in conflict. They feel imprisoned within their own bodies and are unable to translate or/and communicate their anxieties to the male or female members of the household. As a result, the individuation and expression of trans sexuality are not only at odds with the trans sex but also clash with a series of gender constructs imposed by the house/family environment. In The Truth About Me, Revathi discovers the disparity between ‘their’ sex and sexuality, feeling “flawed”, “obsessed”, “confused”, and “anxious” (Revathi, The Truth 15):
I experienced a growing sense of irrepressible femaleness, which haunted me, day in and day out. A woman trapped in a man’s body was how I thought of myself. […] I wondered why God had chosen to inflict this peculiar torture on me, and why He could not have created me wholly male or wholly female (Revathi, The Truth 15).
Feeling alienated within a ‘normative’ household, Revathi painfully wonders: “Would I find them [individuals with similar anxieties], if indeed they were there?” (Revathi, The Truth 14). They strive to create a space of ‘their’ own within the house, wherein Revathi can wear ‘their’ sister’s long skirt and blouse, use a towel to make a fake braid, and walk with ‘their’ eyes to the ground. Moreover, ‘they’ prefer performing household chores typically assigned to the female members of the house, such as to “…sweep the front yard and draw the kolam, like a girl” (Revathi, The Truth 4). Observing this behaviour, Revathi’s sister “jealously complains” that the “girl-boy” hasn’t done the kolam well (Revathi, The Truth 4). This labelling, used derogatorily by family members, highlights their trans behavioural patterns. The household spaces, unable to protect Revathi, further alienate them, leading to a persistent sense of isolation within their own home.
Tripathi’s experience is complex. Their father, described as a “Brahmin... patriarchal to the core” (Tripathi, Red Lipstick 18), is neither supportive nor abusive when “the world would taunt him so much about my sexuality” (Tripathi, Red Lipstick 18). He exerts “some control” by remaining silent, which leads Tripathi to develop a “respect wala fear” for him (Red Lipstick 21). In another narrative, Tripathi mentions that while their father chooses silence, their mother cries profusely (Tripathi, Me Hijra, Me Lakshmi 23). However, the parents’ choice to avoid domestic abuse helps Tripathi grow into a healthy person despite frequent asthmatic attacks: “If it weren’t for him [father], I would have been standing in a brothel, selling my body. I would have been HIV positive by now” (Tripathi, Red Lipstick 21). Trans bonding with male family members is rare but crucial. For Manobi, it is ‘their’ mother “who was my greatest confidante” (Bandhopadhyay, A Gift 10). She tries to persuade Manobi that ‘their’ behaviour is bringing shame to the family. Manobi unapologetically responds: “But Ma, I am a woman…don’t you believe that? Can I not dress up better than any of you? Let me be a girl, Ma…” (Bandhopadhyay, A Gift 10).
Manobi’s mother is horrified by this and, like Tripathi’s father, chooses to suffer in silence: “She never told me so, but I can imagine her pain now” (Bandyopadhyay, A Gift 10). Moreover, Manobi is painfully aware that her mother has to absorb her father’s frustration: “Let your son turn into a hijra right in front of your eyes” (Bandyopadhyay, A Gift 10). Here, the entire family suffers helplessly: “We were a depressed lot and I was to be blamed for it” (Bandyopadhyay, A Gift 10). Thus, the realisation of trans identity leads to a series of domestic anxieties that shape the present and future of trans individuals.
Trans education is crucial for trans empowerment. Beyond formal schooling, the home plays a significant role in facilitating education, particularly when an individual does not benefit much from ‘their’ school environment. For trans individuals, schools often present rifts and tensions. Revathi’s relationship with school is particularly unpleasant. In the village school, girls exclude them from playing games like “five stones, hopscotch, and hide-and-seek” (Revathi, The Truth 5), and they are reluctant to join the boys. The boys tease them, making them a source of “amusement and curiosity” (Revathi, The Truth 5). Teachers are equally harsh. At the town school, adolescent Revathi is unable to focus on their studies and stops attending regularly. Instead of showing sympathy, the family physically abuses them. Their elder brothers thrash Revathi and impose a domestic routine, forcing them to conform to roles performed by the male members of the household:
From now on, first thing in the morning, you will gather all the buffalo dung there is, feed the animals, water them and then leave for school. You’ll do this in the evening too, as soon as you return home. Only then you’ll know what life is, how tough it is (Revathi, The Truth 11).
Revathi cannot protect ‘themselves’ from the domestic abuse inflicted by their brothers and father. Their brothers assign Revathi a domestic space that is completely controlled by them and their father. Upon failing the Class X English exam, the brothers unsympathetically remark:
We knew it’d come to this. We knew this girl-boy would fail. We knew it even then, when he started to dress up as a girl, that he was up to no good. And now he has to stay at home and waste a year (Revathi, The Truth 15).
The authoritarian male members of the household punish Revathi not for failing the exam but because of their trans identity and its manifestations in their daily dressing and behaviour. In contrast, Manobi’s academic performance serves as a shield at home. Although her father and mother are “depressed” for “giving birth to a hijra” (Revathi, A Gift 10), her school grades protect her from abuse:
The only silver lining was the fact that I was extremely good in studies. […] In fact, when my parents would be accosted for not being strict enough to ‘bring me back’, they would proudly show off my marks and say that a boy who was such a genius was bound to be a little ‘different’ (Bandyopadhyay 10-11).
While her family members pretend to accept her, they are internally upset about her trans identity. However, the absence of hostility at home allows Manobi to grow into a confident adolescent: “Somehow, I did not let my awakening sexuality affect my intellect” (Revathi, A Gift 11). Apart from Manobi, the other narrators do not have pleasant experiences at school. At this point, the interaction and support of family members is crucial for the holistic growth and identity formation of the trans self.
Social bonding begins within the domestic space, where emotional connections are established with other members of the house and shaped by its spatial arrangements. This bonding evolves from simple utility into a cultural practice, making the house an intimate space where meaningful daydreams and nostalgia are archived and restored. However, for a trans inhabitant, the normative house space often becomes a space of bondage rather than belonging. Subramaniam (2021) articulates ‘their’ perennial desire for trans individuals to inhabit a house where genuine bonding exists:
Many of us have been ostracized by our own biological families for being trans. We need love, we could give love and receive it, we have a lust for life and longings like all cisgender girls. Above all, we deserve to be in homes, not on the streets begging and doing sex work, right? We deserve to have a husband and a family, don’t we? (Subramaniam 40)
She explains how thousands of Indian men wish to ‘secretly’ marry trans individuals for lust but would never accept ‘them’ publicly. When a marriage proposal comes for Subramaniam’s trans friend Sowmya, the suitor says: “I have a bedridden wife and I am impotent too. I just need someone to take care of my wife and me. I can give whatever Sowmya wants” (Subramaniam 41).
In their search for a home of their own, many trans women “desire a married life” (Subramaniam 41). Yet, according to Subramaniam, securing marriage and adopting a child often remain “a dream” (Subramaniam 41). Furthermore, if the marriage fails, trans women lack legal protection in India. The dream of a home where “respect, peace, love, and security” prevail for “the rest of their lives” is an almost impossible and uncertain idea, often leading to disappointment: “…we will be left out with nothing, no one, no protection, and no justice” (Subramaniam 42). Eventually, disappointment leads Sowmya to end ‘their’ life, while the rest of the trans women remain unmarried for years. However, Subramaniam is hopeful as ‘they’ identify a positive change in society:
What magic! It is happening now after a decade. More transwomen are marrying transmen. It is beautiful and truly magical because a transman accepts and understands a transwoman unconditionally. After all, hasn’t he parallelly gone through the struggles we had gone through from childhood? (Subramaniam 42)
In search of a home of ‘their’ own, Revathi keeps running away from their Namakkal house to hammams in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. Revathi lives like a “fugitive; hounded by the law and police and harassed by goondas and pimps” (Revathi, A Life 7). Despite their troubled life, Revathi finishes writing the book Unarvum Uruvamum but suffers from acute poverty. Echoing Virginia Woolf’s sentiments, Revathi—and indeed, every trans writer here—needs a room and some money to live and write. For these trans autobiographical writers, writing serves as a therapeutic process facilitating a sense of dwelling. While a house and an autobiography are not interchangeable, they are not oppositional either—neither synonyms nor antonyms. In this study, it can be argued that the trans urge to write and to dwell are intertwined. The anxiety to inhabit and dwell in a home of ‘their’ own is deeply connected with the anxiety to adequately represent trans (lived and imagined) lives of their own.
Conclusion
Trans autobiographical writing functions as a form of everyday homecoming for the writers. They employ metatexts to communicate their desire to inhabit a fictional space where they can design a home of their own, countering the always-already arranged spaces of a normative house. Revathi reveals: “The Truth about Me is about my everyday experience of discrimination, ridicule and pain; it is also about my endurance and my joys” (Revathi, The Truth v). Revathi’s everyday endurance and joys can be broadly categorised into three phases: unhomely home, homely homelessness, and shuttling between the two. However, for Revathi, writing is not just a personal journey but also a political articulation:
Whatever affects the hijra community, also affects me personally. It was impossible for me to look the other way or keep quiet. Writing was the most effective tool to deal with the oppression. I had to write frankly and fearlessly about our lives that lived perilously close to the edge (Revathi, A Life 78-79).
In fact, autobiography becomes an anchorage of intellectual and political belonging for all these trans writers. Subramaniam (2021) writes: “Poetry and art [the contents of ‘their’ book] give a richness to my life…I couldn’t have survived my tormented teenage years without them” (Subramaniam 9). Writing empowers and heals Subramaniam, much like a domestic space does for its inhabitant. For Manobi, sitting down to write evokes memories of being homeless-at-home, loved yet “always left” (Bandyopadhyay ix) by ‘their’ lovers. Memory and autobiography are two powerful tools for Manobi to assert ‘their’ way of being, choosing not to conform to a conventional normative society, with the house as its smallest unit.
Domestic ideologies are controlled by gender and cultural expectations, and these ideologies can only be subverted in an artistic space of one’s own. Though Tripathi’s autobiographical narratives (Me Hijra; Red Lipstick) do not contain an author’s note, Pande (the interlocutor in Red Lipstick: The Men in My Life) mentions how Tripathi, while writing the book, “grapples with intensely painful questions” (Tripathi, Red Lipstick 215) as ‘they’ sat by ‘themselves’ at “home in Thane, Mumbai” (Tripathi, Red Lipstick 205). For Tripathi, inhabiting and authoring the book is an expression of their everyday lived “tamasha” (Tripathi, Red Lipstick 205), staged both in the domestic space and in the fictional space of ‘their’ own—or perhaps not entirely their own. Therefore, Indian Anglophone trans-autobiographical narratives are attempts at homing. Domesticity and writing, in this context, help us better understand, interpret, and disseminate the everyday lived experiences wherein trans individuals strive to choose or change a series of social experiences, objects, and people.
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