20 minutes presentation followed by 30 minutes discussion.
'Descending into Femininity': Desire and Divine Sanction in Transgender Rituals of Transformation
Sophiya Sharma (Macquarie)
Muratan (pl.) are male to female transgender dancers from rural Punjab in North India. As itinerant performers of naqqalan - which comprises dances performed in drag as well as comedic skits - muratan frequently traverse the boundary between living as men and performing as women. These transgender dancers frame their desire to ‘become women’ in terms of the divine sanction of the pirs (Sufi saints) for whom they perform naqqalan at the yearly urs (death anniversary celebrations). In this intervention, I will map a trajectory of self-alteration that transmutes gendered and sexual alterity into ritual power through processes of adornment and augmentation.
I'm not a Transmed but....
Lucinda Boxall (Macquarie)
How do hegemonic narratives around transgenderism, especially transmedicalism, foster self-alteration? The ideology of transmedicalism ('transmed') insists that in order to identify as transgender, one must both experience gender dysphoria and be undergoing (or have undergone) gender reassignment processes, fulfilling a desire to wholly 'transition' to the opposite binary gender. These processes include hormone replacement therapy and voice training, as well as primary and secondary ('top' and 'bottom') sex reassignment surgeries. Drawing on my Masters fieldwork, I raise the question of how does an insistence on wholly transformative (and costly) medical processes impact individual trans individuals and their desire to (not) 'transition'?
'True Self': Modes of Self-Alteration among the ex- LGBT and LGBT+ communities
Gemima Fabbri (Malta)
My proposal for this forum is to discuss the ways in which members of the ex-LGBT community and members of the LGBT+ community in Malta engage in modes of self-alteration. For members of the LGBT+ community, self-alteration comprises a central and critical part of their social and personal reality. Through the process of the conversion, members of the ex-LGBT community engage in a complete restructuring of their selves, by altering their sexual and religious identities with the intention of finally becoming their ‘true self’, i.e., the self that God desired them to be (Erzen 2006).
On the other hand, through the process of coming out, members of the LGBT+ community engage in a similar search for their ‘true self’, by restructuring their past and altering their past self through the Born this Way narrative. By engaging in this process, members of the LGBT+ community reinforce their current sexual identity, as well as rationalize and establish their true self as always being homosexual (Bennet 2014). In this sense, members of the LGBT+ community act to alter their selves to refashion a new self which is congruent with their current sexual identity.
In this forum, I wish to compare, contrast, and explain how these two communities engage in self-alteration, as well as explore further the notion of the ‘true self’ and its prevalence in Western culture.
The Spirit of Stone: Materiality and Self-Alteration Among Heritage Stonemasons in Rookwood Necropolis, Sydney
Daniel Trantor-Santoso (Macquarie)
Through ethnographic exploration of the lives and work of stonemasons in a heritage cemetery in Sydney, Australia, my project seeks to understand the very materiality of stone itself and its role in constituting the tone or modality of self-alteration among these men who work on maintaining and preserving the material fabric of the cemetery. Headstones, mausoleums, monuments, sculptures, fountains, and other material objects in the cemetery, all of which are made of different kinds of stone, are therefore subject to different kinds of weathering, respond to the passing of time differently, and react differently to the touch and mark of tools and hands. They therefore demand from the stonemason different sets of capacities, sensitivities, and sensibilities, which can only be fostered by engaging with these materialities themselves. I aim to explore, by drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological work on the elements and the imagination, how the ‘sensuousness’ of stone itself guides or spirits the acquisition of new perceptions, dispositions, attitudes, and ethical modifications in the apprentice stonemason.
Roads to Altered Being: Narratives of Emptiness and Fullness by Alcoholics Anonymous Members
Sophie Avard (Macquarie)
Drawing on existential anthropology, I adopt a phenomenological approach to understand the rich and diverse experiences of emptiness as communicated through the narratives of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) members. It is through these narratives that we can open our minds to moments under which different modes of being appear in the consciousness of AA members. Placing alcoholism within the self, this research holds that the plight of an alcoholic involves the search for a place of fullness, a way to fill an enduring emptiness that one feels within themself and the world.
The Afflicted Client as a Moral Patient: Self alteration and Alteration of the Self
Nikolai Debono (Malta)
The following work takes an anthropological approach to a particular hostel for men recovering from mental illnesses. As clients, they are agentive individuals but simultaneously residents in need of care. Using insights from the author’s fieldwork the text elaborates on this inherent paradox in the operation of the hostel. Tracing back this dilemma, a conceptual crossroad can be located in a dialectical understanding of illness concerning circumstances and character. The notion of 'client' is attached to the conception of mental illness as a circumstantial event sufficing with service-oriented self-alteration. On the other hand, 'character' is a moral project requiring alteration of the self.
Representations of Death as a Mode of Self alteration
Adrian Camilleri (Malta)
Death manifests itself as an attempt to represent the unpresentable. Before mass reproduction, death was experienced as something that occurred within one’s world and which everyone participated in. With the coming of mass media (videos, films etc.) death is now a constant event. The reality of death becomes indistinguishable from a mere representation of it. Death on our “screens” is an abstraction of it. Mediated death does not necessarily make one familiar with it, as it differs with how it is faced and experienced in everyday life. In modern times we see death as a negation: the absence of health. Modes of self-alteration and self-preservation have emerged as a way of ‘survival at all costs’. I shall be looking at how in modern times we self-alter ourselves as a way to cope in a ‘death-defying culture’.
‘A cleaner home, a cleaner mind’: domestic work as a mode of self-alteration in a gated community in Bangalore, India
Janet Fenech (Malta)
In his analysis of various modes of self-alteration, Houston identified how a person can enable action and esteem by manipulating or modifying material and objects in their environment. Other literature has described how one's home can be regarded as an extension of themself, such that work within the home can be regarded as work upon the self. From this perspective, efforts towards achieving an ideal of a ‘good home' can be regarded as a project of self-transformation. My paper examines attitudes towards a 'good home' among residents of an affluent gated community in Bangalore, India, particularly focusing on their cleaning practices and relationships with the domestic workers that were integral to their homes. In critically examining attitudes towards the achievement of cleanliness and the extent to which domestic workers were framed as either subjects or objects within the home − an objectification that was made more evident through the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic − it asks whether ideals of cleanliness and home transformation in middle class Bangalore can be understood in the context of Bangalore’s rapid globalisation and prevalent neoliberal ideology, or if other culturally specific hierarchies are at play.
