Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization South Asia in the World Perspective

This book presents a new approach to the understanding of non-normative sexuality and gender transgressive modes in South Asia and South Asian diaspora. It reconceives sexual representation from the point of view of the theoretical, political and empirical trajectories of decolonization, provincialization and neoliberalism to look at the role of historical contingency, postcolonial sexual politics and gender and sexual diversity. The volume brings together anthropological, historical, material and political analyses around South Asian sexual politics by exploring a range of themes, including culture, class, ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, migration, borders, diaspora, modernity and cosmopolitanism across various local, regional and global contexts.

By using southern/non-Western and subaltern theorizations of gender and sexuality, the book discusses South Asian sexualities through issues such as the sexual politics of indeterminacy; sexual subculture, iconography and political decision-making; religious identity; queer South Asian diaspora; decolonizing the postcolonial body; sexual politics, gender and feminist debates; discrimination, and socio-political violence; the political economy of empowerment; and critical appropriation of the 377 Indian Penal Code. It also builds forms of dialogues to bridge the gap between academic and development practitioners.

With diverse case studies and a fresh theoretical framework, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, sociology and social anthropology, political studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial and global south studies.

Introduction PART I. Colonial Knowledge and Postcolonial Multiplicities 1. Religion, Ritual Power, Exclusion and Marginality: Gender Transgressive Shivashaktis in Telangana, Southern India 2. Uncertain Grammars, Ambiguous Desires: Towards a Sexual Politic of Indeterminacy in Sri Lanka 3. Twenty-Five Years after Dominic D’Souza: What Happens when your Queer Icon Refuses to Be? 4. The Iconography of Hindu(ized) Hijras: Idioms of Hijra Representation in Northern India 5. ‘A Normal Person Cannot Be Made Queer’: The Immorality Act (Amendment) Commission of 1968 in Apartheid South Africa PART II. Transnational Migrations and Diasporic Linkages 6. "I Want a Yaar": Pakistani Muslim American Gay Men and Transnational Same-Sex Sexual Cultures in the West 7. Decolonizing the Postcolonial Body in Diasporic Time and Space: South Asians in the Caribbean 8. Intersectionality and South Asian Non-Normative Sexualities: The Case of South Asian Lesbians and Bisexual Women in the United Kingdom 9. Trans/Queer South Asian Diaspora in the United Kingdom: Whose "Regimes of the Normal" Does "Queer" Critique? PART III. Global Economization of Sexualities and Gender Transgressing Politics 10. Trans South: Practical Bases for Trans Internationalism 11. On the Limits and Possibilities of LGBTI Politics: Contextualizing Socio-Political Violence and Political Transitions in South America 12. Understanding Gender in Nepal: Concepts and Practices 13. Operationalizing the "New" Pakistani Transgender Citizen: Legal Gendered Grammars and Trans Frames of Feeling 14. The Political Economy of Empowerment: Microfinance, Middle Class and the Sexual Subculture in Contemporary Bangladesh

Ahonaa Roy teaches at the School of Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. A social anthropologist, with MA and DPhil (University of Sussex), she previously taught at the Delhi School of Economics, Department of Sociology. She was previously appointed at the Ministry of Health and has been member of the National Urban Health Mission, Government of India. Ahonaa has been part of several projects with the United Nations, USAID and Government of India. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, medical anthropology, community health and sexual health, anthropology of the body and embodiment, postcolonial studies, postmodern feminist studies and Southern theories. Her book The Making of the Cosmopolitan is forthcoming in 2021.