Human-nonhuman home: bioregional cosmopolitan exploration of intersex identity in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Abstract

This research explores the reconfiguration of intersex (hijra) home and identity in relation to human-nonhuman interdependence as represented in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Anjum, the intersex protagonist of the novel, receives humiliation and experiences homelessness for her biological sex ambiguity and nonconforming gender performances in a society founded upon gendered binaries. This study focuses on the complex ways in which Anjum, as a human Other, resolves her gender ambiguity by adopting a cosmopolitan pluralist awareness of self and place in the age of neoliberal development. Since dualisms, constructed along socio-cultural coordinates, such as man/woman, humans/nonhumans, human/human Others, and nature/culture, among others, are integral to the experiences of vulnerability, alienation and marginalization, the reconceptualization of home and identity as plural, accommodating social relations among different human groups and between humans and nonhumans, acts as a strategy, as the study will argue, to alleviate the sense of Otherness. Moreover, drawing on cultural geographical approach to the spatiality of home, mediated by social echelons of gender and class, and bioregional cosmopolitan epistemology of pluralist community-based identity, grounded in human–nonhuman correlations, the study will explore the way a sense of place can be created in a bioregion that ensures agentic participation of human and nonhuman groups in the neoliberal project of development, negating class, gender, as well as species dualisms.