Ethnographies of hijras in contemporary South Asia have often projected hijras as a group lying outside the dominant markers of social differentiation—namely class, caste, religion and ethnicity (Reddy 2005a; Nanda 1999). Although hijras often crosscut such markers in terms of accepting people of various backgrounds, the class dimension of hijra identity has been largely ignored. My hijra interlocutors often emphasized what they styled as ‘lutki kholer maigga’—literally, ‘effeminate boys of the poorer families’—in describing the social standing of their natal families. ‘It is not that hijras are not born to the upper and middle classes, but only those from the lower classes join the community,’ commented Josna, a hijra in Dhaka. Moyna, another hijra, once stated, ‘The upper- and middle-class hijras are called gay. They have their own societies but we are no different from them in essence.’ This chapter brings into view specifically the role of class in the formation of hijra subjectivity. I argue that the public vilification of hijras is not reducible to their sex–gender difference alone, but inherent in this process is a class-cultural politics that works to reproduce such discursive and material abjections. In advancing my argument, I contend that class is not a static category but a social fact always in the making. Focusing on hijra spatial practices and location within the urban socio-cultural milieu, I bring into view the complex interplay between class, gender and sexuality in the production and reproduction of hijras.

Scholars within the field of critical gender and sexuality studies have noted the problematic tendency to overlook class in the formation of sex–gender subjectivities (Binnie 2011; Heaphy 2011; Hennessy 2000). While culturalist queer theory tends to reduce subjectivities to the level of discourse alone, the material queer strand calls for a re-materialization of sexuality studies. Material queer theorists argue that the very invocation of class as an analytical tool continues to be intellectually suspect in much of the cultural queer theoretical strand. The main criticism of the cultural queer body of scholarship is that the privileging of class has often resulted in the relegation of gender and sexual subjectivities to the status of a super-structural excess. That is, subjectivities have been read as superfluous derivations of an over-determined economic structure (for example, Morton 2001).