Examines the colonial and postcolonial governance of gender and sexuality through the history of transgender Hijras in north India.

A pioneering collection of articles on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual language.

"During the colonial period, Indian intellectuals--philologists, lawyers, scientists and literary figures--all sought to hold a mirror to their country. Whether they wrote novels, polemics, or scientific treatises, all sought a better understanding of society in general and their society in particular. Curiously, female sexuality and sexual behavior play an outside role in their writing. The figure of the prostitute is ubiquitous in everything from medical texts and treatises on racial evolution to anti-Muslim polemic and studies of ancient India. In this book, Durba Mitra argues that between the 1840s and the 1940s, the new science of sexuality became foundational to the scientific study of Indian social progress. The colonial state and an emerging set of Bengali male intellectuals extended the regulation of sexuality to far-reaching projects that sought to define what society should look like and how modern citizens should behave. An exploration of this history of social scientific thought offers new perspectives to understand the power of paternalistic and deeply violent claims about sexual norms in the postcolonial world today. These histories reveal the enduring authority of scientific claims to a tradition that equates social good with the control of women's free will and desire. Thus, they managed to dramatically reorganize their society around upper-caste Hindu ideals of strict monogamy"--

With Respect to Sex is an intimate ethnography that offers a provocative account of sexual and social difference in India. The subjects of this study are hijras or the "third sex" of India—individuals who occupy a unique, liminal space between male and female, sacred and profane. Hijras are men who sacrifice their genitalia to a goddess in return for the power to confer fertility on newlyweds and newborn children, a ritual role they are respected for, at the same time as they are stigmatized for their ambiguous sexuality. By focusing on the hijra community, Gayatri Reddy sheds new light on Indian society and the intricate negotiations of identity across various domains of everyday life. Further, by reframing hijra identity through the local economy of respect, this ethnography highlights the complex relationships among local and global, sexual and moral, economies. This book will be regarded as the definitive work on hijras, one that will be of enormous interest to anthropologists, students of South Asian culture, and specialists in the study of gender and sexuality.

This book offers a detailed analysis of the experiences of sex workers in India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the book describes the lives of sex workers, drawing out themes of agency; notions of gender and sexuality; and women’s engagement with the HIV ‘industry’. The analysis provides a novel critique of the medicalised focus of HIV prevention and suggests alternative discourses on women’s sexuality, sexual behaviour and desire.

The topic of sexuality and gender within the South Asian context is timely and widely discussed across a variety of academic disciplines. Since the end of the last century, there have been debates in the cultural sphere in India on issues concerning Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender people’s rights, gender, sex workers’ rights and caste. There has also been an explicit visibility for sexuality in the form of discussion around intimate scenes in films, advertisements and moral concerns around pre-marital heterosexual relationships and same-sex relationships. This book brings out the modalities through which explicit visibility of sexuality gets constituted in the public space of India after the 1990s. The specificities through which relations of gender/ sexuality and caste get constituted and performed in regional media provide significant entry points to an understanding of larger structures and the ever-present fissures through which these larger structures emerge. Focussing on the southern state of Kerala, the book investigates women’s sexuality and caste through a number of case studies: the Suryanelli rape case, neology in the media and the debates around the life narratives of Nalini Jameela, a sex worker. The book does not stop at representational practices as it also looks at the negotiations between the subject and her represented figures which is a significant addition to the existing body of work in the field of media and gender studies. Sexuality and Public Space in India is a careful interrogation of the mass-mediatized space of contemporary public discourse around sexuality. It will be of interest to academics in South Asian Studies, Sociology, Anthropology and Gender Studies.

Through analysis of an impressive array of 'low' and 'high' Hindu literatures, particularly pamphlets, tracts, newspapers, and archival data, Gupta explores the emerging discourse of gender and sexuality, which was essential to the development of notions of Hindu communitality and nationalism in the colonial period. The book offers an exceptionally nuanced account of Hindi gender politics.