Gender Trouble in South Asia GEETA PATEL Keywords: colonialism, gender, Miraji, photography, sexuality, Sheba Chhachhi, Sri Lanka, South Asia Nagarı ̄ nagarı ̄ phirā musāfir ghar kā rāstā bhū l gayā Kyā hai merā kyā hai terā apnā parāyā bhū l gayā —Mirājı ̄ , Tı ̄ n rang 1 [I]t can be demonstrated that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and renewal of something living— the original undergoes a change. —Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator I T IS THE THIRTIETH anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher of gender, sexuality, and governmentality, Judith Butler. When Gender Trouble came out in the United States, it hit the stands like a hit; it transformed and unraveled the modalities through which ontologies and epistemologies of gender came to be. This was especially the case with the trouble, the disturbances, the turbulence that Gender Trouble carried along with it. Gender Trouble’ s thematics sometimes synco- pated against familiar habits of belief that were and are carefully nursed and held to one’ s heart, upending them in sometimes unexpected ways. The concept of “performativity,” for instance, generated a buzz, partly because it unhinged and reoriented several fail-safe, deeply felt materialized beliefs, such as the ontological immutability of gender cohering resolutely and unremittingly in and through an inveterate notion of the biological (belief certainty in the sense that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might intend as the unnoticed grounding of one’ s sense of and use of language itself laid in so deeply that it disappeared from immediate purchase). Gender Trouble also asked us to address the seemingly intransigent separations between interiority and exteriority and the obdurate artifice of an “interior core” (psyche, soul, etc.), which, because it was constituted as a priori, meant that people believed it lay beyond being touched or constituted by any Geeta Patel (patel.weston@gmail.com) is a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Lan- guages and Cultures and in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia. 1 This is the manuscript version in my possession: “Wandering from town to house, a wayfarer / mis- places the road that gathers him home / That which was once mine/and your belongings, / both foresworn from memory / Mine and yours no longer known.” The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 79, No. 4 (November) 2020: 947–967. © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2020 doi:10.1017/S0021911820002399 947 of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911820002399 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 174.226.140.6, on 16 Dec 2020 at 17:01:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms