Sexology, Confession, and the Racial Life of the Case History in Colonial India

• In Event: Shifting Methodologies in Sexual Science: Sexology and the Human Sciences in South Asia

English Abstract

This paper interrogates the methodological currency of the case as modern sexology’s preferred method for producing “truths” about sexuality in colonial India. Tracing the emergence of the case history as a mode of reasoning and research within sexology at the turn-of-the-20th century, I argue that its use as evidence for (homo)sexual identity in Europe indexed imperial metropolitan sexologists’ reliance on a normative theory of the mimetic relationship of confessional genres to liberal personhood. By representing patterns of sexual desire, fantasy, and practice through the first-person confessional during the clinical-psychological interval in sexology, the genre of the auto/biographical case constructed sexuality in terms of individual identity. But I show that to claim authority as the arbiter of sexuality in Europe, modern sexology staged both a disassociation from, and a compromise with, colonial anthropology’s ethnographic methods because the latter highlighted social markers like religion/custom as preeminent explanatory factors for native sexual deviance. In colonial environments, sexology’s distancing of anthropology remained partial as it continued to rely on ethnography to identify sodomy as a symptom of the “open secret” of Indians’ customary proclivity to unnatural vice. I argue that such disciplinary diagnostic practices derived from the colonial assumption that individualizing genres like the auto/biography were alien to Indians, resulting in minoritizing the case history in Indian sexual science. In privileging sight over voice, the field over the clinic, and punishment more than discipline, modern sexual knowledge systems short-circuited the technē for producing “sexuality” as the self-confessed truth of Indian individual personhood.

Author

• Rovel Sequeira, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor