Autobiography and Transgender Worlds: Body and Queer Corporeality

In the context of rapidly changing biomedical interventions and emerging non-surgical practices of gender transformation, the paper explores various issues associated with trans procedures that trans people in the three autobiographies go through namely, Manobi Bandyopadhyay's A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi, A. Revathi's The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story, and Living Smile Vidya's I am Vidya: A Transgender's journey. One of the main events of the three autobiographies is the sex change surgery that the three protagonists, Somnath (later, Manobi after sex change operation) in A Gift of Goddess Lakshmi, Doraisamy (later, Revathi after sex change operation) in The Truth About Me, and Preeti (later, Vidya after sex change operation) Living Smile Vidya's I am Vidya: A Transgender's journey undergo. The paper problematizes various issues related to trans procedures that Somnath, Doraisamy and Preeti undergo and attempts to find answers to questions such as if Somnath's and Doriaswamy's undergoing transgender procedures can be ‘simply' equated with other forms of body modification such as tattooing, piercing and cosmetic surgery, and is not to be considered as a ‘complete, pathological rearrangement of identity'; can these transgender procedures be called a way of reorganizing the protagonists' body to suit their image of themselves; is it possible to extricate social and political implications of transgender procedures that the three protagonists experience; if ‘trans' procedures that the three protagonists experience can be seen in context of pseudo-medical accounts of transsexual autobiographies that tolerate body-modificatory practices so far as they enable a move away from strangeness and towards normalcy; do the protagonists opt for ‘trans' procedures to alleviate the pain of being strange and engender a process of becoming ‘normal'; and whether or not trans practices constitute some form of self-mutilation.