Paper short abstract:

This paper will look at effects and the legal reasoning underlying the Criminal Tribes' Act of 1871, which criminalizes the "eunuch" population in colonial India. I will discuss how the Act tried to reform their bodies in terms of stable gender roles, sexuality, production and spatial practices.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I will focus on the Criminal Tribes' Act of 1871, which established, a priori, the criminality or illegality of the activities conducted by groups considered to be potentially "dangerous". I will argue that this legal act is better understood as a strategy of production of space through the fixation of particularly "deviant", queer, bodies into it. Queerness, in this context, is precisely the condition of strangeness, abjection, of deviance of a kind of body resistant to the legal, productive and spatial politics of the Empire. I will be particularly focused on the figure of the "eunuch", which was, in this context, both a legal and an anthropological "invention", as the "third sex" of the hijras of the local cosmologies was transformed on the "male impotence" or "cross-dressing" of the eunuch. I will then explore how the provisions of the Act are basically meant to regulate eunuchs' bodies in their spatiality by disposing and confining them into one particular sphere of colonial space - secrecy, as opposed to publicity/public sphere. The focus of this research is West Bengal, and more precisely colonial Calcutta in the late period of British presence. I will, last but not least, reflect on how the eunuchs' case may open new avenues of inquiry on the gendered nature of the production of colonial space, as well as on the articulations between law, colonialism and gender/sexuality.