University of Sussex
Browse

File(s) under embargo

Less than a day

until file(s) become available

Subjectivities, knowledge and gendered and sexual transitions in India

chapter
posted on 2023-06-09, 22:26 authored by Paul BoycePaul Boyce, Akshay Khanna

Based on ethnographic encounters in India over three decades, the authors reflect on what it means to study gender and the sexual. They argue that knowledge of gender and the sexual is bound up with epistemological and historical legacies, political ruptures, and subjective estrangements. In particular, the chapter critically engages the trajectories through which ontological assumptions about gendered and sexual selves have been configured and reconfigured over time. Moving away from the assumptions of “interiority” as the space for articulating or experiencing subjectivity, and from notions of “authentic,” extant cultural “types,” they look at the shifting material conditions and multiple temporal trajectories of forms of identification and self-evincing. Gendering and evincing of sexual selves emerge as terrains of partial connectedness between people, concepts, and material “things” as opposed to wholly defining attributes of any given subject. Three categories of gendered and sexual selves (kothi, hijra, and transgender) emerge and disappear over time in relation to each other, and to registers and economies of signification of law, health policy, activism, religious nationalism, and anthropology. This took shape within and across intimate lifeworlds, state actions, and transnational (mis)connections, here apprehended ethnographically.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Publisher

Cambridge

Page range

491 - 519

Book title

The Cambridge Handbook of the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality

ISBN

9781108647410

Department affiliated with

  • Anthropology Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Martin Fotta, Silvia Posocco, Cecilia McCallum

Legacy Posted Date

2020-12-11

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2020-12-11

Usage metrics

    University of Sussex (Publications)

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC