Notes
2
Bodies at Surveillance
Appearance, Social Control, and Female Body Image in India’s Postmillennial Lesbian and Trans Narratives
Introduction
Lesbian and trans bodies are viewed as abject and hence become sites of political control. Narratives in the Indian context depicting the lesbian body’s nonbinary desire and aesthetic spill over the gender cartography to destabilize the heterosexual imperative. Trans women negotiate their identities and bodies to fit in cultural contexts and find multiple ways to craft their identities. Not surprisingly, several Indian narratives by women with alternate sexual identities have touched upon the problem of body image. In this regard, one also notes how, within a commodity culture, heteronormative ideals pressure lesbians to look a certain way in order to be visible as lesbians. Sridevi Nair (2008, 408), in “Hey Good Lookin’!: Popular Culture, Femininity and Lesbian Representation in Transnational Regimes,” for example, argues that this commodification of lesbian identity leads to an aestheticization of lesbian body image even though lesbian identity is constantly under threat from the state. Nair describes how films and movies present the lesbian body as an offshoot of the upper-middle-class heterosexual perspective on what bodies in public spaces should look like. Western gender critics like Caroline Huxley and Nikki Hayfield (2012, 3) have explored this problem and state that alternate sexualities become a regime; lesbian and gay appearances become policed to fit into an authentic sexuality. Critic Laura Kelly (2007) likewise informs that internalization of sociocultural norms is more influential to body image than a lesbian identity. Further, Kate Bornstein’s (1994) seminal work, Gender Outlaw, lists the dominant culture’s perception of women based on appearance and contemporary lesbian anxiety about conforming to these ideals while retaining their sexuality. Evidently, the lack of appreciation of the lesbian body is linked to low self-esteem and resilience in everyday life (Chanana 2015). And all such disabling conditions form a part of the embodied experiences of the protagonists of the two main narratives selected for analysis in the present study, namely, Astha in Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman (2002) and Anamika in Abha Dawesar’s Babyji (2005).
The present chapter explores appearance vis-à-vis lesbian and trans body image with the central focus on intersections of experiences among sex, body image, gender behavior, and desire. It does so by taking into account how desire and gender are oppositional categories in nonheterosexuality (Butler 1990, 30; Chanana 2015, 26; Roy 2017, 176). Further, it explores how each protagonist’s body image reflects her desire and gendered expressions and how gender expressions influence the meaning of desire. The politics of control in the lesbian sexualities of Astha and Anamika in A Married Woman and Babyji, respectively, are a representation of the internalization of hegemonic heterosexuality through their body image. Strikingly, both narratives are located within the fashion-conscious and appearance-obsessed capital city of India, New Delhi. Astha in A Married Woman, for instance, represents the essentialist practices of hegemonic femininity through a male voyeuristic lens. In Babyji, on the other hand, Anamika’s deliberate rejection of the feminine self and her mimicking of masculinity are read as an attempt to appropriate her lesbian desire within oppressive heterosexuality. This chapter thus establishes two things. First, it examines how the writers of the two works, Manju Kapur and Abha Dawesar, focus on the critique of appearance as an ostensible gendered identity. Second, it reads how the authors address body image and appearance discrimination, which in turn problematizes and marginalizes lesbian and trans bodies. The two narratives, as this chapter proves, establish how body image problems hold true for women with nonnormative sexual identities. Further, Kapur’s and Dawesar’s narratives set the stage for examining trans women’s body identities, issues that have been addressed in autobiographical works such as I Am Vidya, The Truth about Me, and A Gift of Goddess Laxmi. In sum, this chapter reads various postmillennial narratives of struggle that trans and lesbian women, with their so-called nonnormate or masculine bodies, face while attempting to fit into the hegemonic heteronormative female body image.
In addition to narratives by Kapur and Dawesar, a powerful discourse on the predicaments of trans bodies is found in Living Smile Vidya’s autobiography, I Am Vidya (2007), where she mentions how she became a part of a cultural process, and where she, in a male body, tries to enact a femininity that opposes the dominant cultural ideals. Thus, Vidya, a trans woman from Tamil Nadu in India, demonstrates how one experiences life with or through the body, which may or may not mirror the standards of an appropriate feminine body. Vidya states, “When I was in surroundings other than home or college, I generally felt quite free to be myself. On such occasions, I walked swaying my hips like a woman, sat with my legs crossed stylishly or rearranged my hair in a feminine way when the wind blew it across my forehead” (Vidya 2007, 44). The idea of femininity in a masculine body is considered inappropriate in a cultural milieu such as India since such a body subverts the social roles and norms linked to the female body. In truth, however, the body is in constant flux, altered by activities and technologies that are experienced through a gendered lens and judged by an oscillating set of standards. And this is what Vidya’s narrative establishes. Similarly, autobiographical narratives such as The Truth about Me (2010) by A. Revathi and A Gift of Goddess Laxmi (2017) by Manobi Bandyopadhyay offer insights into the struggles of anxiety in a body that society calls anomalous for its in-betweenness and dissociation and highlights the politics of control that is effected through appearance norms, which in turn define cultural ideals of femininity. The examination of such narratives of struggle and resistance informs the core of this chapter.
Theories of Body Image and Nonnormative Female Sexual Identities
Female body image suffers largely from the politics of control and is constrained by the regimes and ideals that are directed against it. Early research also observed that body image assumes a heterosexual imperative, as “the phenomenon was limited to or most powerful when one of feminine beauty in the eyes of men” (Cash and Brown 1989, 362). Feminist critic Sandra Lee Bartky rightly questions the idea of docile bodies in the context of female bodies in “Foucault, Femininity, and Modernization of Patriarchal Power” and mentions:
Where is the account of disciplinary practices that engender the “docile bodies” of women, bodies more docile than that of men? Women, like men, are subject to many of the same disciplinary practices Foucault describes. But he is blind to those disciplines that produce a modality of embodiment that is peculiarly feminine. (1997, 132)
The discipline of control and surveillance that is produced through a set of beauty standards is imposed on women because cultures associate certain ideals and modes of enactment as feminine, but what must be understood is that “we are born male and female, but not masculine and feminine” (Bartky 1997, 132). These sets of standards and ideals are imposed on female bodies and, in turn, engender female body image concerns. With regard to this standardization, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock (1987) offer an explanation of body image and identify ways of viewing the body that can be useful for understanding and thinking about women and lesbian bodies. According to them, “body image refers to the collective and idiosyncratic representations an individual entertains about the body in its relationship to the environment, including internal and external perceptions, memories, affects, cognitions, and actions” (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987, 16). On similar lines, Sari H. Dworkin references fat politics to explain that lesbians suffer from body image problems because they “live and work within the heterosexual, patriarchal society” (1989, 33). It is thus evident that the female body is central to the analysis of many areas of social experience, self-presentation (Goffman 1956, 1963), and sexuality. And clearly, these are cultural dictates that associate mannerisms, behaviors, and attitudes as masculine or feminine. The body is a site in which cultural and social constructions come into being and are mapped onto individuals. Masculinity and femininity are culture-specific constructs that impart a set of instructions or prescriptions on being an ideal man or woman. Gender signifiers of femininity and masculinity are incorporated by individuals who mimic the heterosexual paradigm.
The gender hegemony in lesbian bodily identities is played out in demarcations such as “butch,” “femme,” “lipstick lesbians,” “queen,” “MSM,” and so on (Halberstam 1998, 212). Such demarcations of butch/femme, as critic Lillian Faderman (1991) mentions, emerged in lesbian communities by the 1950s. Although butch/femme culture encompassed far more than just a dress code, appearance was nevertheless a significant feature. Butch/femme styles allowed lesbians to identify one another, while also affording lesbians a way of expressing themselves as distinct entities from the dominant culture. Appearance, in their case, therefore becomes the hegemonic gender performance for an individual. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, describes appearance as “a metaphor of the ontological material reality of the body” (1990, 60). It is through the surface of the body—that is, how a person looks, dresses up, or performs gender-specific behaviors—that a person’s embodied identities are defined. Sociologist and gender critic Ahonaa Roy, in “Sexualising the Body: Passionate Aesthetics and Embodied Desire,” defines appearance as one that “constitutes the cultural meanings imposed by the signifiers in the body that install certain social meanings through the materiality of their existence” (2017, 175). Body is thus socially and culturally shaped, and the politics of the body is different from the body politic, which in turn asserts that the body itself is politically inscribed and is shaped by practices of containment and control. Within this paradigm, the ordeal of not feminine enough affects the identities of trans women, who most of the time have to struggle with their masculine bodies to fit into the vexed ideal of femininity and often experience anxiety, in-betweenness, and dissonance. As they experience gender transition, which itself is born out of the hegemonic heteronormative female body image, they often have to grapple with established parameters of feminine embodiment. The standards of appropriate gendered appearance also dictate what it means to look like an ideal man or woman with corporeal ideals and hence are subject to cultural pressures. Body image concerns are associated with trans feminine identities, and trans women experience struggles with feminine characteristics and the primary and secondary markers of their feminine identity, and this results in conforming to the beauty ideas set by a hetero-patriarchal society. Butler explains femininity as an artifice, an achievement, “a mode of enacting and re-enacting received gender norms which surface as so many styles of flesh” (1985, 11) that shatters the hegemonic paradigm and opens discourses for male femininity and female masculinity. Such readings are crucial to the present discussion on the body image of women with alternate sexualities in India.
Patriarchal Control, Homoeroticism, and Body Image in Kapur’s A Married Woman
The complex system of cultural production exercises a repetitiveness that comes to be understood as natural once it has been practiced for ages. The study of gender recognizes that in this deviously repetitive social order, all gender identities, including heterosexual male and female norms of embodiment, are produced and regulated through a repository of symbolic meanings. Specifically, in terms of women’s bodies, such symbolic meanings are found in behavior, clothing, body shape, and appearance. Mimi Schippers terms this hegemonic femininity as “characteristics defined as womanly that establish and legitimate a hierarchical and complementary position to hegemonic masculinity and that by doing so guarantee the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (2007, 94). These overt and idealized feminine traits in women, which are emphasized by the patriarchy and translated to compliance, nurture and ensure cis-male dominance over all femininities (Schippers 2007, 95). Therefore, any deviance from this hegemonic femininity—which is often read as lesbian desire, or nonfeminine appearance such as butch and other masculine femininities—is marginalized and regulated. This regulation of hegemonc femininity occurs through a systemic act of seeing, a panoptic power wherein the subject is controlled with a set of heterogeneous codes of conduct. This leads to self-censorship, a control that is often internalized by human subjects (Foucault 1982; Menon 2012). One encounters a powerful critique of this problem within the context of contemporary India in Manju Kapur’s A Married Woman.
The surveillance of the body’s appearance and its clothing assigns suitable behaviors and roles that the female body is worthy of performing. Delving deep into such politics, Manju Kapur, in A Married Woman, depicts how the protagonist, Astha, imbibes hegemonic notions of masculinity and femininity and how she is drawn to what she believes is safe—a physically strong man with masculine features. Kapur, through her tale of a broken marriage and a turbulent homosexual affair between her protagonist, Astha, and her lover, Pipeelika Khan, provokes her readers to examine how heteronormative bodies and images of femininity and female beauty plague modern Indian women. To begin with, Kapur depicts how Astha suffers from a deep sense of inadequacy in her body and its feminine features as she “marvels” at her so-called ugliness, wondering if she will ever find someone to love and marry (Kapur 2002, 8). Eventually, Astha marries Hemant, but she is caught in an unhappy marriage, only to find some respite in a homosexual relationship. It is worth recalling Foucault’s “The Subject and the Power” (1982) at this juncture to examine how the panoptic seeing of the state/dominant culture via the hegemonic codes of femininity is a systemic act of controlling its lesbian subjects. The cultural panopticon arguably contests the sexual transgression of all women with alternate sexualities by essentializing the heterosexist and compulsory feminization of the body. Highlighting this, Kapur writes how Hemant, a flag bearer of said heterosexual hegemony but a liberal on the surface, likes Astha’s legs perfectly waxed and how the smell of sweat and vaginal fluids makes him nauseous, so Astha powders herself constantly (Kapur 2002, 45). Obviously, her homosexual urges or her homoerotic body have become an anathema to her husband.
Astha’s deep lack of self-worth based on her appearance and her lack of sexual confidence allow Hemant to occupy the entire space between them, and she is increasingly pushed to the margins. The only means by which she can reinforce her identity as a (desirable) woman is by her physical appearance, her gender role, and her behavior, all of which need to conform to the feminine. In a telling episode, Hemant coaxes Astha to wear a baby doll dress during sex, although she is hesitant. The baby doll highlights her perky breasts and effectively sexualizes her body to suit a male fantasy. Astha’s helplessness here is redolent of gender critic Kuhu Sharma Chanana’s essay entitled “Plurality of Lesbian Experience in Modern Indian Writers,” where she writes how heterosexual pleasure is often about the satisfaction of the penis alone and leaves the woman wounded and dissatisfied both emotionally and physically (2015, 164). Clearly, in giving in to the fetishes of Hemant, Astha not only fulfills the culturally coded acts of a woman and wife, but her appearance and self-perception also reaffirm her own gender as a heterosexual wife and woman.
Initiating the contemporary debate on female body image in the West, Naomi Wolf, in The Beauty Myth (1991), asserted that a woman’s self-perception of her beauty influences her sexuality and the actualization of her sexual desire. Wolf also argued that this notion of what constitutes beautiful creates a prescriptive parameter over women’s body shape and appearance. Wolf also stressed that falsely interlocking the two makes it essential for a woman to be feminine in order to be sexual and that “the definition of beauty and sexuality constantly changes to serve the social order” (1991, 150). Since such body image dictates privilege heterosexual identity, they in turn adversely affect the self-image, confidence, and body image of lesbian and trans individuals. In Kapur’s novel, Astha’s body image is beleaguered by heterosexist definitions of femininity that make her feel ugly as she undergoes childbirth and then bears signs of aging. The bodily changes that alter her full breasts, narrow waist, and youthful skin make her feel less of a woman and reduce, in her mind, her feminine potential. In a telling episode, upon wearing a dress, Astha finds herself unattractive and hence also finds herself less appealing sexually.
Kapur, in A Married Woman, dethrones not only the discourse of a happy Indian marriage but also deeply problematizes the male gaze that often belittles the female body for not bearing an ideal body image. The narrative demonstrates how the female gaze in lesbian desire becomes a remedying experience for Astha, who suffers heavily under the male gaze of her husband, and society at large, while trying to uphold heterosexist femininity. More important, Pipeelika, Astha’s lesbian lover, does not adhere to heteronormative standards of feminine beauty. She is shown to have “pale milky coffee” skin, as opposed to Astha’s light skin tone, and strands of artificially colored hair (Kapur 2002, 62). Further, Astha observes how Pipeelika cares very little about her appearance whereas she herself worries constantly if she is well dressed or groomed enough (Kapur 2002). In one instance, Pipeelika takes off Astha’s rings and bangles, at which Astha’s insecurity is evident as she exclaims, “I look so pale without them,” to which Pipeelika responds, “All the better” (Kapur 2002, 222). Through her nonchalance toward body image ideals, Pipeelika gradually and metaphorically unburdens Astha of the heteronormative pressure to constantly look beautiful and feminine. She takes Astha to the bathroom mirror and makes her look at her face and body in admiration, beyond her frail skin and aging face (Kapur 2002, 221). Hence, Pipeelika helps her find autonomy in body image and appearance beyond the conventional notions of beauty and sexual appeal. Therefore, it is only in her sexual awakening and her lesbian desire for Pipeelika that Astha is able to transgress the codes of hegemonic femininity. Toward the end, Astha’s desires are no longer linked to her body’s appearance and the incessant need to be physically attractive in the feminine way that Hemant desires. This enables Astha to redefine her body image and sexual appeal, opening up for her immense possibilities beyond the limitations of her corporeality.
Female Gaze, Lesbian Desire, and Body Image in Dawesar’s Babyji
Appearance and the nonnormatively sexualized female body once again find a compelling rendition in Abha Dawesar’s Babyji. It is common knowledge that clothes express the gender of a person, allowing categorization of the person into fixed identities in a geopolitical space. Clothing in India, for instance, helps to add taglines on sexuality such as “straight,” “gay,” or “lesbian,” as well as labels on appearances such as “sexy,” “slutty,” or “aunty.” Within lesbian identities, clothing and appearance styles can refer to the butch identity, where a woman is perceived as masculine, and the femme identity, which refers to a feminine lesbian. In Babyji, the protagonist, Anamika, observes how Indian society mandates that older women be called “aunty,” hence taking away any sexual or female bonding between different age groups (Dawesar 2005, 2). In Anamika’s numerous homoerotic affairs, it is this labeling of the female body and its appearance that she powerfully questions and often subverts. Significantly, Dawesar’s narrative, when read in the light of Ahonna Roy’s thesis on homosexuality, finds great relevance. Quoting Elizabeth Grosz, Roy argues that body inscription builds representational practices as “rendering to political economy of the body in terms of looks, sexual signifiers, gendered meanings, individual biography, cultural signifiers and so on” (2017, 182). This, claims Roy, establishes norms of attractiveness and ideas of beauty associated with femininity and often leads to the marginalization of women with nonnormative sexualities.
Strikingly, a posture Anamika adopts to counter hegemonic gender and appearance norms is to mimic the masculine ideal in order to appropriate her lesbian sexuality through her mannerism and way of dressing. The only way Anamika can normalize being sexually attracted to other women is by dressing up in a manner that makes her masculine—in her case, in checked shirts and jeans. On her first visit to her lover India’s house, she decides to dress up as a young boy. Anamika reveals that a “lot of the clothes were still young and girlie” and that she “chose a red-striped boys shirt and jeans. I wore black boys’ shoes, slapped some Old Spice on the neck from my father’s toilette and rode my bicycle over” (Dawesar 2005, 7), all in the hope of attracting her newfound lover. One notes here how appearing male also impacts the concept of self-construction of a young lesbian individual like Dawesar’s protagonist. In fact, Anamika’s boyish clothing reaffirms her fantasy to be a boy or “prince.” Discussing such forms of dressing, Grosz states that they “produce the meaning and intensity of the body’s surface, underlining the psychic and bodily embodiments to its consciousness” owing to which “the body is . . . historically shaped and socially imagined, which fashions the perpetuation of identity semiotics” (qtd. in Roy 2017, 185). Understandably, in Anamika’s case, such dressing to alter her appearance helps her affirm her own position as a budding homosexual woman.
These tendencies continue as Anamika embodies the gender roles and behaviors of men with her dream to study abroad and priorities career over relationships. One notes in her a constant need to rescue the women in her life and to play the hero, gestures that also reaffirm her nonnormative sexual self and her need to transcend her female limitations. Anamika is therefore flattered when Rani, her maidservant, mistakes her for a boy (Dawesar 2005, 14). Ironically, then, Anamika embodies the heterosexual imperative while being a lesbian woman. Her own appearance, way of dressing, and behaviors help her relate to a Brahmin, cis, upper-class, and therefore empowered man (27) while also validating her own homosexual urges. To her patriarchally inscribed female gaze, Anamika therefore considers herself unattractive and unappealing before the male gaze. At the bus stop, for example, when two men leer at her, she is surprised before she is disgusted at the prospect of men finding her sexually attractive. She exclaims, “I wore glasses and was relatively dark. I had short hair, I was average looking and flat chested. I wondered what on earth they were looking at” (84). Here Dawesar points out how Anamika disregards her own feminine appearance, considers beauty to be inconsequential to the mind, and wants to be an intellectual, all the while also showing a keen awareness of ideal female body image. Be that as it may, when it comes to her sexual choices and partners, Anamika views India and Rani as purely physical beings and is primarily attracted to their conventionally beautiful selves. “I saw them as women. I liked their flesh,” she claims (130).
Anamika’s female gaze and her understanding of female beauty therefore problematize the issue of heteronormative female body image. Most body studies scholars have challenged the ideals of beauty that Anamika likes in her partners as a means for lowering women’s self-esteem and regulating their gendered performance. Further, Anamika considers herself ugly and as a result exercises her power in other ways or by imitating masculine strength and virility. In Anamika, therefore, one finds a convoluted extension of what Chanana calls the “narcissistic streak of the beauty” (2015, 191), which is expressed in the perverse power she feels for sleeping with normatively beautiful and sexy women like India and Rani. And, like a smug male after a sexual conquest, Anamika reduces her lovers to a trophy, an object, or “a doll, a toy” (Chanana 2015, 191). The complexity of Anamika’s female gaze and the issue of female body image within homosexual paradigms therefore prove to be patriarchal, or what Laura Mulvey calls “scopophilic” (1975, 3). In Anamika’s hetero-patriarchally defined albeit homosexual worldview, then, it is a heterosexual cis man who is not only intellectual but also powerful and attractive. It is not surprising that in a later episode where Anamika sits surrounded by India, Rani, and her mother, she calls herself the patriarch, feeling exhilarated for being surrounded by women she knew, by women who “belonged” to her (Chanana 2015, 162).
To examine Anamika’s case, it is worth turning to Sridevi Nair’s thesis in “‘Hey Good Lookin’!,” where she argues that the masculinization of the female gaze is a means by which women’s subversive potential gets appropriated by a heteronormative and hetero-patriarchal culture. Nair argues that in media and in other discourses, women with nonnormative sexualities are
comfortable to watch because they look like familiar everyday images of sameness. the butch disappears in light of the attention that the feminine (not femme) bodies command and there is literally no body/nobody to disrupt the heteronormative and masculine gaze because even the butch is disciplined by commodity aesthetics. (2008, 417)
True to these assertions, Anamika views herself in the dominant and active role, especially when she is with Rani, whom she considers the submissive and passive partner given the latter’s lower-class status. Not surprisingly, Anamika is brazen enough to force herself upon Rani against her comfort and for the sake of her own pleasure while disregarding Rani’s individuality as a human. Anamika reveals:
I threw her on the bed and started ripping open her blouse. She closed her eyes as if she didn’t want to see me. The German guy from the porn magazine, but with Chakra Dev’s face, the Brahmin from the movies with his servant, positions from the Kamasutra all mixed up in my head till I could no longer think. I felt rapacious and greedy for her. (Dawesar 2005, 95)
The violence here mimics the same sexual violence that Anamika and her last love interest in the novel, Sheela, experienced in an unfortunate bus ride. If Anamika here projects her humiliation and victimization onto Rani, who is the passive figure, she does the same with Sheela as well. In both cases the victims are marginalized in terms of class and gender. And also, in both cases, the two women, Rani and Sheela, are normatively beautiful while Anamika is not. In fact, Sheela is said to be light skinned and healthy; she keeps long polished nails, has perfectly waxed legs, and wears her school skirt higher than most girls, revealing her “shapely” legs (Dawesar 2005). Obviously, in Anamika’s heteronormatively aligned thinking, her so-called beautiful partners are to be ravaged and consumed. This can be understood with the help of Chanana’s argument that “women are culturally trained to love women only through masculine appropriation of power” (2015, 40). And in such discourses of power, body image, too, often follows heteronormative imperatives between trans and lesbian couples.
Anxieties of the Wrong Body: Female Body Image and Trans Narratives of Dissonance
Just as the lesbian women discussed in the two narratives earlier experience complex problems with regard to their body image, trans woman, too, are subject to much shame, ridicule, and even torture owing to their nonnormate bodies. Trans women and hijras (South Asian term for transgender people) call into question both the stability of sex and its relationship with the social and psychological categories of gender. And many times, as this section demonstrates, such individuals undergo gender transformation. Notably, the two primary aspects that are a part of this gender transformation include castration or emasculation and surgery, which ultimately leads to creating a female body along with other feminine markers of gender identity for trans women. Like in many other cultures, castration has cultural connotations related to hijras in India. Revathi, who was born a boy in rural Tamil Nadu, mentions her experience of the ritual in her autobiography, titled The Truth about Me. “Hijras who undergo this operation do not eat fruit or drink milk for forty days. On the fortieth day, they offer puja to Pothiraja Mata,” claims Revathi (2010, 75). Surgery or emasculation here is the careful assessment of the body and then its transformation, which is executed medically. And such surgeries are performed to give trans women the body image that a larger heteronormative culture assigns to them.
In the context of surgeries, Nikki Sullivan (2006), a critical theorist of body, in “Transmogrification: (Un) Becoming Other(s),” examines similarities and differences between transsexual surgeries and other forms of bodily modifications such as piercing, tattooing, cosmetic surgery, and willful amputation, which are often carried out more out of choice than compulsion. Likewise, in her study entitled “Embodying Desire: Piercing and the Fashioning of Neo-Butch/Femme Identities,” Lisa Walker (1998) critically examines dichotomous accounts of nonmainstream body modifications and cosmetic surgery in which the latter is understood as a form of compliance to normative gendered standards of beauty and the former is represented as a radical political practice and nonmainstream body modifications become a site of political control. In the light of such studies, it may be claimed that trans women, especially in India, mimic and accentuate feminine traits and mannerisms associated with heterosexual women—that is, name, attire, length of hair, and adoption of feminine pronouns and language. The use of nonverbal bodily presentations such as clothing, sartorial style, mannerisms, kinesthetic, and other factors influencing their presentation of the self are also geared toward a feminine identity. Such mimicking among trans Indian women brings to mind Foucault’s panopticon where the threat of the cultural gaze is enough to ensure compliance with a rule. In fact, drawing upon Foucault, what Peter Conrad (1992) describes as medical surveillance is a form of social control in which bodily and mental conditions can be understood through a medical gaze such that authority is transferred from individuals to biomedicine, and this is once again true for many trans women.
Within the Indian context, such a heteronormative medicalized gaze becomes normalized and individuals continue to use techniques of medical surveillance to make sense of their own bodies. This invisible force of the gaze is naturally directed against trans women’s bodies in order to accommodate the vexed notions of femininity despite the presence of their biologically nonnormative bodies. Hijras experience dissociation and anxiety in their masculine bodies and sometimes find themselves in between identities during gender transition. Revathi, we know, identified as a boy in the early years of her life, but by rejecting the notions of boyhood and claiming authority over her femaleness, she, over time, constructs her feminine identity. Her narrative depicts the essentialist heteronormative notion of femininity that can be enacted only in a female body, and hijras are ridiculed for their feminine appearance and mannerisms in masculine bodies, which in turn adversely affects their body image.
Like Revathi, Manobi Bandyopadhyay, in her autobiography titled A Gift of Goddess Laxmi, recounts a distaste with her body in the early years of her life. Bandyopadhyay reveals, “I was developing a distaste for my genitals. I just couldn’t accept my balls and my penis. I wanted to have my sisters’ genitals” (2017, 8). Clearly, such accounts display the body-dysphoria experiences that are often the lot of trans Indian women. The fetishization over the heteronormative female body ideal creates surveillance and regulates the body ordeal among trans women. Appearance therefore becomes an important axis for such entities as it connotes “the interplay between and appearing” (Roy 2017, 175), and, as Butler (1990) mentions, “body becomes a mark of institutionalised heterosexuality” (qtd. in Roy 2017, 175) and enables newer forms of feminine signification. Manobi accounts that “I craved to dress up as a girl and be taken as a girl” (Bandyopadhyay 2017, 13) and also mentions the effect of such signifiers of appearance on her body image. She discloses, “I would feel jealous of the girls. Why did no one look at me and tease me? Was I not more desirable than those girls?” (11). Such disclosures foreground the dissonance in trans women who try to perform male roles while at the same time desire feminine bodies and male appreciation. The quest for visibility of a female body is communicated through the feminine signifiers and it is rendered invisible by the male body.
The narratives by Revathi and Manobi underscore how anxiety is a natural and common response among trans women for inhabiting so-called anomalous bodies, and hence body image concerns are an integral part of trans women’s lived experiences. Critic Talia Bettcher’s (2014) concept of the “wrong body” in transsexuality becomes relevant here because it involves a misalignment between one’s gender identity and one’s sexed body. The phrase “wrong body” describes the feeling that one’s body is not a part of one’s self. For a bearer of the wrong body, her inside does not recognize the outside of the body, and she suffers a deep disconnect. Manobi’s account describes such dissociation of identity and in-betweenness among trans women:
There were times in my life when I doubted myself and the path I took. In such instances, my mind would go into a state of flux and the turmoil would sear me from within. Am I really a woman trapped in a male body? Why is it the whole world think of me as a man who is nothing more than a sissy? (Bandyopadhyay 2017, 109)
Quite clearly, the existence and celebration of normative heterosexual female bodies are linked hegemonic cultural norms in every given society. Keeping this in mind, it is but natural to assume that Manobi yearns for dominant feminine signifiers and artifacts that accentuate femininity, as reflected in her autobiography. Manobi mentions, “I was desperate to come to terms with myself. . . . I thought of myself—a girl who did not have a vagina and whose breasts showed no signs of developing. I continued hating my penis and the very thought that I had one between my legs made me loathe myself more” (34). Here, ashamed of her natural trans or wrong body, Manobi wishes to associate herself with feminine markers of the body such as menstruation. Manobi bemoans, “I would yearn to menstruate. . . . In the privacy of my room, I would make similar sanitary napkins and tie them around my genitals to fake periods” (35). These attempts at feminine significations present the dominant cultural pressures and signifiers from a heteronormative gendered society on trans feminine bodies that make them anxious in their so-called wrongness.
Given their deep and insatiable need to appear feminine, trans women attempt to express their femininity through mannerisms, sartorial style, body language, and feminine gestures that are deemed as markers of femininity. In sum, they try to pass as women, an act that Susan Brownmiller (1984) in Femininity describes as modified dress, manner, attitude, and voice adopted by someone who wants to be perceived as feminine (or weak) enough and hence be accepted. Befitting such discourses, Manobi narrates:
I was not “male” in every sense of the word. They found me odd and made no effort to hide their surprise. My femininity was quite pronounced in my mannerisms and though I didn’t wear women’s makeup, my unisex attire, make-up, sunglasses and hairstyle make my sexual preference quite apparent. (Bandyopadhyay 2017, 91)
In the context of trans women’s body identities, Arthur Frank’s (1991) typology of body use in “For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review” is suggestive of the social control trans identities experience in nonheteronormative bodies. Frank describes how the disciplined body becomes predictable through regimentation. Likewise, he argues that the mirroring body predictably reflects what is around it. It is also dissociated, assimilating only the objects made available for it to consume. The dominating body, claims Frank, is the male body characterized by the sense of lack, and it is contingent on its own fragile ability to dominate. Finally, the communicative body, in Frank’s thesis, is in the process of creating itself. The body’s desire is the reciprocal expression and the recognition of others rather than consumption, mirroring, and dominating. And this is entirely true for body identities of trans women like Revathi and Manobi.
Clearly, then, female bodies are not sufficiently female or feminine unless they assume social modifications. And they must be rebuilt by artificial means. Female bodies therefore often seem inadequate at best or ugly, disgusting, or threatening at worst, unless tamed or improved upon. Understandably, the likes of Manobi reject this construct; in her words, “I would not become a woman in the sense that nature or society understands a woman to be. I would neither menstruate nor would I bear children, but I would have a vagina and breasts to heighten my sexuality and that was of utmost importance to me because it would give me the identity that I had craved all my life” (Bandyopadhyay 2017, 134). It is apparent here that the female body is not naturally destined to be heterosexual, but it is made to fit the heterosexual gaze. And within this cultural paradigm, trans women’s body anxieties are natural given that they are doubly marginalized under various intersectional body norms.
Conclusion
This study situates lesbian and trans narratives, both fiction and autobiographies, as cultural artifacts and reads how heteronormative female body image impacts trans and lesbian body identities. It does so not only because such an analysis is relatively absent from scholarship on LGBTQ identities in the Indian context but also because there is a need for a collective acceptance of lesbian and trans bodies that is contingent upon redefining and theorizing discourses privileging heteronormativity and patriarchy. Such narratives illustrate how lesbian and transgender bodies negotiate their ways through cultures obsessed with heteronormative feminine bodies and beauty ideals. The narratives under scrutiny represent how body image issues of lesbian and trans women condition them to conform to hegemonic femininity. Hence, if Anamika in Babyji chooses to appear tomboyish to appropriate lesbian desire and in turn ends up mimicking the pedantic cis-male gender standards of appearance and beauty, Revathi in The Truth about Me, through her sartorial style, attempts to mimic heterosexual femininity.
Arguably, then, within lesbian subcultures and communities of transgender women, dominant heterosexist beauty norms impose pressures on lesbians and trans women look attractive and conform to heterosexual standards of beauty. And while heterosexual women suffer from the patriarchal male gaze, lesbian and trans women experience body anxieties of being excluded from the category of “women” and therefore end up conforming to the appearance ideal. Astha in A Married Woman is therefore seen to validate several aspects of her identity—as a wife, a woman, and a lesbian—through forceful conformation to hegemonic beauty norms. Revathi likewise is also seen conforming to normative feminine beauty ideals. The pressure of such appearance norms is detrimental to her self-worth and confidence. And to defy these, Anamika actively denies her feminine self to authenticate her lesbian desire, yet chooses partners who appear beautiful according to heteronormative body image standards.
In the light of the narratives examined in this chapter, it may be concluded that lesbian and trans women’s bodies are not reducible to organic processes or cultures of isolation. Embodiment is a dynamic discourse that produces the body and its capacities. Trans and lesbian bodies have the capability of articulating creative languages around the body, which in turn can produce varied gender discourses and experiences. It is therefore appropriate to conclude the present discussion with Diane G. Crowder’s (1998, 50) argument where “she asserts that cultural gender definitions determine how the biological female is (re/de) constructed into a feminine woman,” an imperative that lesbian and trans women must negotiate with every day.
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