CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE
Jawaharlal Nehru University
SEMINAR SERIES
akshay khanna
Social Anthropologist, Political Activist, Theatre Practitioner and Amateur Chef, New Delhi
On
Splitting with Hegel: Sexualness and the Challenge of Reimagining the Subject
Abstract : The Hegelian theory of Self Consciousness forms a presupposition for most notions of subjectivity in European thought. This is made more explicit in Queer theory owing to the centrality of Hegel to the work of Judith Butler. Queer theory that simply reproduces Butler without recognising this, in a sense replicates a European imagination in the global south, maintaining an imbalance in the geopolitics of ideas.
The book Sexualness (New Text 2016) is an attempt to conceptualise what it means to think the sexual 'from the south'. It marks a shift away from ‘sexuality’, most often ascribed to the ontology of personhood, as though who or what one desires, or has sex with, defines what one is. This is symptomatic of a liberal imagination of the political subject whereby the interiority of an individual is treated as the space for the resolution of antagonisms in the world. This form of the subject is the basis of the Human Rights framework, Constitutions of liberal democracies and the ‘international’ discourse of LGBT rights, which thus structures the political, juridical and affective space that portends to connect queerness globally. To a large number of people around the world, however, there is no post-coital question of personhood and sexual continuity does not make us into particular ‘sexuality types’. There is, in other words, a ‘sexualness’ that escapes the frame of sexuality – desire and eroticism that flows through people without constituting them as subjects. This recognition opens up questions about subjectivity per se, whereby we recognise the challenge of conceptualising the subject not as an interiority, but rather, as transactional, relational and often, ephemeral articulations. Drawing on ethnographic research that informs the book, the talk will examine the machinations that enable the Christian roots of Hegelian thought to continue into Queer theory and lay out a strategy for engaging pressing questions of political subjectivity in the contemporary moment.
3.00 PM, Monday, 26 March 2018
Conference Room, CSLG, JNU
About the Speaker: akshay khanna is a Social Anthropologist, political activist, theatre practitioner and amateur chef based in New Delhi. akshay’s initial training was in law, after which it worked at a Human Rights NGO in New Delhi. This was followed by an MA Medical Anthropology (SOAS) and a PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. It has, since, held the position of Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University, as Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, and as an independent consultant in international development and human rights. At the IDS, akshay convened the Sexuality and Development Programme and was instrumental in expanding the scope of the programme to focus on the political economy of sexuality, questions of law, legality and constitutionalism, and issues around race, nation and fundamentalism. akshay also led on the development of a philosophical, political and analytical approach called ‘Unruly Politics’ and a successful course of the same name. akshay’s first book length ethnography, 'Sexualness' (2016, New Text) tells a story of Queer activism in India and offers a theoretical frame that demonstrates what it looks like to look at the sexual from the south. Its current research relates to the erotics of political authority and unruly politics. It is co-director of RAPT (Research Activism Performance and Theatre), which is developing theatre as a methodology of research.
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