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CC BY 4.0

A contribution to: Voyages

Edited by Emily Di Dodo and Rachel Hayes

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 18

Modern Humanities Research Association

open

Abstract.  This article examines Myself Mona Ahmed (2001), a collection of letters written by one of Delhi’s famous hijra personalities — Mona Ahmed, interspersed with photographs of Mona taken over a decade by renowned photographer Dayanita Singh. I first locate the text within Cáel M. Keegan’s conceptualization of good and bad trans objects. Keegan critiques how contemporary liberal representations of trans experiences actually operate within the normative visuality of binary arrangements of gender and sex, idealizing linear movement from one gender into another as the penultimate aspiration of all gender variant individuals. As opposed to this, Singh and Mona refuse aspects of linearity and closure in their autobiographical journeys and present a conception of text-subject that constantly exceeds frameworks of the gender binary. This enables them to rework conventional understandings of autobiography as progressive narratives of an individual self, by employing an aesthetic of literary-visual intermediality. This operates at three levels of relationality in the narrative: between the textual and visual elements, between Mona and Singh as shifting subjects in the narrative, and between the text and the reader. In constantly pushing against closure, Singh and Mona defy the reader’s expectations of having ‘known’ the autobiographical subject through the act of reading. Through that, the narrative becomes an active site of protest in an ethos where gender-variant bodies are being increasingly bureaucratised and assimilated within essentialist discourses of nationhood and identity.

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