Voicing the Voiceless

Cinema always represented the society, and any visual representation about ‘not so commonly discussed' topics becomes crucial as they are the image blocks for the future generation. The power of cinema is high among Tamil audience, which is evident from the emergence of two great political leaders who are byproducts of it. It is essential to understand how sexual minorities are represented in a culture-specific society. In India, representation of the third gender was insensitive, and Tamil cinema is no exception. These representations cannot be ignored as ‘just in screen' as screen represents reality. Nevertheless, few fair images are making a significant impact on the audience about transgender. Studying representations about sexual minorities in Tamil cinema is important in today's context, where young minds are exposed to digital platforms. This chapter explains the description of the transgender community in Tamil cinema and analyses its impact on society.

Governing Thirdness

Khawaja Sira of Pakistan are a heterogeneous group of marginalized gender nonconforming individuals who defy traditional notions of gender and sexuality. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lahore, Pakistan, Governing Thirdness provides important insights about the identity, marginalization and governance of the Khawaja Sira as they try to live an unliveable life. Taking a broad view of governance, this book includes a comprehensive analysis of governance of the Khawaja Sira across legal, social and administrative institutions. It also argues that labels like third gender and transgender fails to account for the gender fluid lives and multiple types of individuals who identify as Khawaja Sira, yet these categories, largely imported from the west, are used without much thought to govern this heterogeneous group.

Transgender and the Right to Employment in India: Analysing the Trajectories of Discrimination

<p>This research aims to investigate the trajectories of discrimination these communities face in the employment sector. While doing so, the authors have emphasized that despite a clear mandate of ‘Right to Work’ in the Constitution of India, policymakers, governments, and the Indian judiciary too has been keen only on laying down framework only concerning ‘Rights at work.’ In this sense, the authors opine that India presently lacks a clear employment non-discrimination framework. Even almost all the labor laws of India stipulate rights and duties post-recruitment scenario. There is an apparent lack of pre-recruitment guidelines. In this light, the authors see the Supreme Court’s recent judgment in the NALSA case recognizing the Transgenders as ‘third gender’ and the efforts of the Indian Parliament to frame a law on the protection of the rights of the transgender people as a silver lining in the cloud. This paper highlights the underpinnings of this development by still emphasizing that something needs to be done more on the front.</p><p> </p><p><strong> </strong><strong>Keywords:</strong> Transgenders; Employment; India.</p>

Recognition of Transgender Community in Domestic Legal Regime: A Comparative Analysis between Sri Lanka and India

Transgender is an Umbrella term to define the people whose gender identity and gender expression differ from their gender assign at birth. At present, the concept of transgender has acquired a great attention in the western world and the number of territories legally validate the transgender community and their rights through national legislations. Concerning South Asian context, the third gender concept is recognized by the Indian Supreme Court but unfortunately, the legal system of Sri Lanka is reluctant to amend the laws to ameliorate the position of the transgender community. This research mainly focused on transgender identity and the laws relating to the transgender community in Sri Lanka and India. The purpose of the research is to examine the existing laws relating to transgender identity in both countries. Moreover, this piece of work tries to identify the contribution of law in improving the position of the transgender community in these territories. Further, this work mainly used the comparative research method and based on internet retrieved documents. Through this work it suggests and identifies the ways and means to improve the condition of Sri Lankan transgender community. Recommendations will be made in this respect. Keywords: transgender community, third gender, legal system, legal recognition, society

Il terzo genere? Koṭhī, hijṛa, kinnar e donne trans alla ricerca di cittadinanza nell’India contemporanea

Hijṛā communities from South Asia are often taken as an example of social acknowledgment of transgender in a ‘traditional’ context. Nevertheless, this exoticizing representation erases all distinctions among hijṛā, kinnar, koṭhī, third gender persons, transmen and transwomen, and other individuals whose gender identity does not conform to the man/woman binary. In this article, I will introduce the debate about identity construction of people that complicate the binary gender identity, within the framework of citizenship claims and homonationalism.

Nominal number in cushitic

Cushitic languages have a number of interesting properties in the category of number. None of these are valid for all Cushitic languages. Number is not obligatorily expressed in various Cushitic languages which have a general number form that is unspecified for number. Nonetheless morphological number marking in the noun is often complex in two ways: there are many competing lexically determined morphological markers and many different constellations of derived singular and derived plurals. Number and gender show complex interactions in Cushitic. Number formatives impose gender and hence different gender values for different number forms in the same lexeme, sometimes apparent gender polarity (singular and plural having opposite values for gender). A theoretically challenging property of some languages is that that there is a third gender, here labelled ‘plural’ because it takes the agreement morphology of 3pl pronouns.