“THE WOMAN THEY ARE, THE MOTHERS THEY NEVER HAD, THE MOTHERS THEY WANT TO BE”:TAMIL TRANS WOMANHOOD, MOTHER GODDESS WORSHIP, AND MOTHERING PRACTICES

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic study of the forms of motherhood and mothering practices that occur in Tamil transfeminine (Thirunangai) worlds in Singapore and Malaysia. I argue motherhood as a sustained constellation of work, action, emotions, and social actors going into managing everyday lives and desires situated within an intersectional web of identities. Two significant forms of motherhood that simultaneously challenge and replicate ‘ideal’ forms of Tamil cis-motherhood emerge. They are relationships between Thirunangai-mothers and daughters and Thirunangai and Mother-Goddess attachments. Narratives of strategies for survival and sense-making of Thirunangai-personhood underpin both forms of motherhood. Challenging the universality of an ethical motherhood, Thirunangai mothering practices that train daughters to achieve womanhood through sexwork not only highlight maternal love as conditional but also reveal daughters’ ambivalence and understanding towards their mothers’ exploitation. They felt that the limited survival options available to Thirunangai-mothers hardened their mothering practices that necessitated dependence on daughters’ earnings. In the process, mothers did not realise the extent such practices yielded violent self-understandings amongst daughters. In a similar vein, as another strategy of ensuring survival, the Thirunangai and Mother Goddess attachment is evoked to bestow divine powers that anchors Thirunangai identity. This increases their negotiating capacity to survive socially in the profane. However, this disproportionately exceptionalises Thirunangais that limit their sexual freedoms, challenging the limits of Thirunangais’ negotiating capacity when they contradict gender performances of ‘sacredness’. Such accounts replicate and challenge notions of gendered mothering categories, creating connections across time and space.