2142 - (Author Meets Critics) Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

Jyoti Puri’s award-winning Sexual States identifies the neoliberal logics embedded in a Delhi high court victory decriminalizing homosexuality as presaging its failure upon appeal in the Supreme Court, as visions of privacy and individual responsibility were refracted through colonial logics of state power. Puri refutes claims that the reinstated antisodomy law was somehow archaic, showing that sexual regulation is always intimately connected with contemporary governance. By examining conflicts within and among state institutions in the treatment of sexuality, Puri theorizes how transnational forces and local activist groups can, and cannot, influence particular struggles by means of the state. This work encourages us to rethink the role of state agencies and seemingly rational practices (such as statistics) and shows how such practices are subjectively used to police populations. Through this ethnography of the state in India, Puri demonstrates how racialized populations are pervasively sexualized and legally and institutionally framed as sexually non-normative. Puri also explicates the ways that gender, sexuality, and racialization constitute and are constitutive of one another, pushing us to consider how race and racialization processes are always about gender and sexuality. This work highlights subjective applications of law, placing research and findings in conversation with scholarship and law in nations around the world to make sense of how transnational forces both shape and are shaped by sexual governance in India. Puri’s book makes contributions to feminist legal studies, transnational sexuality and queer studies, queer of color critique, intersectionality, and ethnography.

Sub Unit

• Section on the Sociology of Sexualities

Session Organizer

• Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, American University

Presider

• Vrushali Patil, Florida International University

Panelists

• Ghassan Moussawi, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Tina Fetner, McMaster University

• Rod Ferguson, Yale University

• Jyoti Puri, Simmons University