Beyond the binary: (Trans)gender narratives and class distinction in Rituparno Ghoshs later films

Abstract

This essay will examine how the later films featuring or directed by Ghosh, with Arekti Premer Golpo (Just Another Love Story) onwards, oscillate and negotiate between two distinct narratives of (trans)gender identification, one based on a binary model of gender, and the other on a ternary model. The essay will argue that both these models are foundationally constituted through a class-/caste-restricted access to bourgeois modernity and enlightenment. The first model is of a woman in a (wrongly) male body, necessitating the external transition from male to female body. This model, corresponding to the biomedical discourse of transsexuality, has a relatively recent genealogy in the Bengali media and particularly in the much-publicized transition narratives of two trans women, Manobi Bandyopadhyay and Tista Das. In contradistinction to this narrative, Ghosh draws on an older narrative of thirdness and gender liminality - in distinction from, rather than in transition between, both genders - which is often associated with hijras and kothis (a diverse spectrum of third gender and feminine/effeminate persons assigned male or intersex at birth) in the ethnographic literature, but without making much reference to these communities. Ghosh establishes a double distanciation from working class/lower caste narratives of gender variance, and constructs a class-restricted script of gender choice and fluidity premised on bourgeois trajectories of modernization. This becomes particularly ironic and poignant in light of hir appropriation and celebration by both the middle class and working class gender-variant communities to different ends; Ghoshs posthumous gun salute and celebration by transgender/hijra/kothi communities accompanies the continuing, and perhaps increasing, criminalization, surveillance and pathologization of these communities.