Liminality, Gender Performativity and Transgender Subjectivity: A Study of A. Revathi’s The Truth About Me

Abstract

This paper critically analyzes the lived realities of transgender persons in India via an analysis of the autobiography of A. Revathi, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story. The study draws on Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of “becoming” to explore the deep dissonance between biological assignment and internal selfhood. The paper maps this trajectory through Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s anthropological frameworks of the rites of passage, specifically the stages of separation, liminality, and incorporation. This analysis shows how institutional trauma and social alienation push transgender persons into the marginal space of the hijra gharana, a site of communitas, yet unable to protect them from structural hostility. The paper also discusses the medical and biopolitical challenges of Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS) and claims that physical integration into a female body does not mean social integration. Transgender people are consistently and constantly put into a liminal space, with the fierce and heteronormative society and the continued global transphobia, despite the immense psychological and physical trauma that they go through. In the end, Revathi’s story is an important critique of strict gender binaries and calls for a radical rethink of social inclusion, bodily autonomy and human dignity.