Temporality, Space and Sexuality in the Indian City

<strong>CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> SEMINAR SERIES <strong>SVATI P. SHAH</strong> Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst On <strong>Temporality, Space and Sexuality in the Indian City </strong> <strong>Abstract : </strong>Over the past decade, a sea change has occurred in discourses of sexuality throughout the Global South. In this presentation, I review this set of changes in India, by focusing on sex worker, transgender and queer spatial politics as they have been unfolding in Indian cities, in media, and in the law. These transformations may ostensibly be read through the rubric of modernity, in that, if sex workers have been subject to ‘temporal distancing’ through erasure, then gay and transgender rights are increasingly framed as signs of the times. The rising discursive legibility of gay, lesbian and transgender subjects, in particular, has been acute in the wake of a stalled national campaign to decriminalize “unnatural sexual practices.” Here, I suggest that, while the familiar frame of 'modernity and its Other' is useful for understanding some of the new juridical and other discursive regimes of sexuality being produced in South Asia, these rubrics must, in their turn, be read through the twinned lenses of migration and temporality. My argument takes up Benjamin’s assertion in his essay on translation, that “In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul.” I contend that, by considering the question of modernity alone, the discourse of sexuality has risked being read as biologized constraint. Countermanding this propensity requires concomitant attention to a materialist history of sexuality, and specifically to how, where and why discourses of sexuality have moved, and to what effect. <strong>Friday, 22 January 2016</strong> About the Speaker: Svati P. Shah is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Shah earned a PhD in 2006 from Columbia University’s joint doctoral program in anthropology and public health; she also holds an MPH from Emory University. Dr. Shah has published work on a range of topics that explore the intersections of urbanization, sexuality, migration and political economy. Her ethnographic monograph entitled Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work and Migration in the City of Mumbai was published by Duke University Press in 2014