Sexual States: Governance and the Struggle over the Antisodomy Law in India (original) (raw)
Related papers
2008
By examining discursive struggles around sexuality in contemporary India, I show how and when the legal status of sexuality becomes used by individuals and communities to make political claims about their relations in and to the post-colonial nation-state. The ‘modern’ legal system introduced by British colonial rule installed state regulation of homosexuality and sex work in India. I look at when and how homosexuals and sex workers challenge these regulatory discourses and practices, considering these as post-colonial contestations over the legal and cultural meanings of “tradition” and “modernity.” I ask two primary questions: First, how do the legal and political challenges of these two groups become articulated in the face of local needs and practices and in the context of globalization and transnational concern about HIV/AIDS; and second, what do these challenges reveal in general about state power over how human bodies are used (biopower) in a postcolonial context and in speci...
Recent Changes in Gender & Sexuality Policy in India: A Postcolonial Analysis
Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Gender Research (ICGR), 2019
In the past year, several important policy changes regarding gender and sexuality have occurred in India. In the month of September 2018, two pivotal rulings were made by the Supreme Court of India. (1) On September 15, 2018, the Supreme Court overturned Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), a relic of the British Penal Code that had outlawed sexual activities deemed to be “acts against the order of nature.” Previously, this had ostensibly criminalized both homosexuality and gender nonconformity. (2) On September 26, 2018, the Supreme Court decriminalized adultery by overturning Section 497 of the IPC. (3) In July 2018, the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament, passed the Trafficking of Persons bill. If passed in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, and signed into law, the bill would define new offenses under Section 31 of the IPC as “aggravated forms of trafficking,” punishable with imprisonment for 10 years to life, plus fines of a minimum of 100,000 Rupees. (4) In August 2018, the Transgender Persons Bill passed in the Lok Sabha, but has not yet passed in the Rajya Sabha. This bill would introduce regulations where individuals would need to be medically screened in order to be legally recognized as a third gender person in India. In 2005, India created a new third gender designation (E), distinct from males (M) and females (F), opening the option for people to register under this designation on their passports, voting registration cards, and other legal documents. Taken together, these policy changes mark significant shifts to the ways in which the State in the Indian context regulates gender and sexuality. This paper seeks to review these current policy changes in light of the history of how sex work and gender nonconformity have been regulated in the historical periods before, during and following colonialism.
True Sex and the Law: Prostitution, Sodomy and the Politics of Sexual Minoritization in India
Sexuality Studies Reader, 2013
This chapter offers a schematic analysis of juridical discourses of sexuality in India through a reading of two significant contemporary legal events that occurred within a year of each other. These were the widely discussed 'reading down' of Section 377, the anti-sodomy statute of the Indian Penal Code, in July 2009, and the 'defeat' (or, 'temporary withering'?) of proposed reforms to the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA), the law that governs transactional sex in India, in December 2008. In bringing these events into the same analytic frame, this chapter aims to outline what is at stake in elaborating the alliances, connections, and points of contact between sex workers' and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) organizations and movements, by marking the rubrics and uses of 'privacy' and 'dignity' that contextualize and structure these jurisprudential events.
The LGBT (Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender) activism has raised the issue of sexuality and, in particular, alternative sexuality, and argues for its 'normalcy'. The state, on the other hand, has taken exception to such democratisation of 'desire' and has tried to 'discipline' it. The LGBT activism challenges the hegemony of the 'heterosexual' state. This paper explores the issue of sexuality and its alternate forms in India with special reference to the form, content, and spaces of lesbian and gay activism vis-à-vis Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC); strategies of assertion; and its problematic relation with the women's movements.