Abstract
Feminist and critical health scholars such as Sontag (1989) and Waldby (1996) poignantly observed that in the dominant discourse, declarations of epidemics are likened as declaring a war where the language of militarism prevails. It is in these trying times, we see suspension of the civil rights of the marginalised groups who are actually victims of the epidemic. Writing about the social implications of these metaphors, Sontag laments that it made certain illnesses as abject and by extension, of those who are ill.
While analysing the state’s disciplinary apparatus to control the intimate lives of people categorised as ‘MSMs’ in the context of HIV/AIDS, the present book ‘Sexuality Reimagined: MSM in Modern India’ captures the lived experiences of Kothis. Focusing on the narratives of the masculine bodies found on the margins, Shailja Tandon unveils the manner in which ‘MSMs’ constitute their sexual subjectivities through practices and activities in everyday settings. Tandon illustrates the native sensibilities and sensitivities of things and people considered trivial and remain invisible in the quotidian affairs of life. Narratives of Kothis are drawn from an intensive ethnographic study of 2 years—netted through participatory observations, in-depth interviews, audio-visuals and group discussions—in Lucknow with the help of Bharosa Trust. The author also interviewed eminent queer activists and employees of Naz Foundation and observed Integrated Counselling and Testing Centres. Understanding Kothis are imperative for two reasons, one, they do not fit into the heteronormative framework and cannot be classified as heterosexual or homosexual and second, a paucity of literature exists on Kothis compared to hijras. The book attempted to address a pertinent question: how modern subjectivity is constituted through the confluence of risk, medical sexuality and penal acts imbricated in the discourse of governmentality. While answering this question, Tandon examines the relationship between epidemiological knowledge and governmentality and its ramifications on the people following non-conformist gender identities and how do they negotiate and make and remake their post-colonial sexual subjectivity.
The book consists of six chapters and the first chapter ‘Locating the Political in Sexuality’ clearly outlines research questions, objectives, theoretical frameworks and chapterisation. Second chapter maps important social science scholarships—Freud, Foucault, Adriene Rich, Carol Vance, Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, etc—which problematised sexuality and critically analysed the discourses of sexologists, biomedicine—proclaiming itself having the sole authority to speak the truth about sex and desire—and epidemiology. Complex entanglement of feminism and queer scholarship is another focus of the chapter.
Third chapter ‘Homosexuality, Law and Medicine’ is a very fascinating chapter encapsulating the messy low politics or the everydayness of the state that are experienced in the microsites of the technologies of the governance in colonial India. The strength of the chapter lies in historicising the non-conforming gender identity in South Asia in a nuanced manner. Drawing from Robert Aldrich (2008), Ronald Hyam (2010), Charu Gupta (2002), etc, the first section sketched masculine nature of colonial expansion and traced not just how and why colonial regime disciplined, policed and criminalised same-sex relationships amidst reformist campaign in Britain, but also impeccably underlined defiance of these regulations—through different tactics—by natives and imperial officers who were in high and low posts in India. Tandon provided ample examples such as Paidikion—an erotic manuscript—authored by an army serviceman, nawabs kept young boys in harems, Pathan men known among the British military and other officials who preferred to engage in same-sex acts, leisure activities performed in private space (called as ‘paregal’) by the colonial administrators, soldiers, traders and others in the imperial service and literary work like ‘Chaklet’ written by Ugra which engaged in sodomy, homosexuality and sexual relationship between men and adolescent boys. Significantly, the author underlined that Western understanding of sexuality is different from India. In the former homosexuality is fixed to sexual orientation by categorising them as homosexuals or heterosexuals whereas in the latter an exclusive confirmation of homosexual identity in the private and public domain was uncommon and men knowingly and unknowingly engaged in diverse sexual acts which make their identity fluid and processual. Author reiterates this point in the fifth chapter which documents the experiences of Kothis. Second section of the chapter focuses on how medicine was the sites and instruments of colonial governance through which the author ties to the post-colonial governance of subordinate sexualities through the onset of HIV/AIDS. The third section of the chapter deals with the origin and the development of the law that is Section 377. Here, the author makes compelling argument (while quoting Khanna (2016) and Sharma (2008)) that it reflected colonial anxiety and subjectivity rather than Indian morality because, one, it criminalises voluntary sexual acts wherein no third party is harmed, two, before the spread of imperialism, Indians had a broader and more generous outlook towards sex.
Fourth chapter ‘Sexuality and State in Modern India’ engages intensively with the sexual norms that existed in post-colonial India which was inherited from colonial era and further shaped by forces of globalisation with the dominance of AIDS industry. While using the framework of ‘surveillance medicine’ enunciated by David Armstrong and ‘prudentialism’ of Nikolas Rose, author discuses social governance of sexual subalterns in which political issues are removed from political arena and placed it in the language of science/epidemiological register (p. 86). She explicates how through these governance programmes sexually marginalised people express themselves directly in biological terminology to avail the privileges of citizenship. Besides detailing about the National AIDS Control Programmes in different phases and its modifications in each phase, the author discusses HIV/AIDS (Prevention and Control) Act, 2018 which restricted the forceful subjection of HIV-infected persons to medical research and test and disallowed revealing their identity. However, the disjuncture between the law on the book and on the ground is brilliantly underpinned in the fifth chapter ‘The State and The Risky Subjects’ while examining the functioning of Uttar Pradesh State AIDS Control Society (UPSACS).
Fifth chapter, another intriguing one, dwells on the lived experiences of sexual subalterns -borrowing Nilsen and Roy (2015)’s point of relational and intersectional contours—and with a specific focus on the affective aspects of Kothis wherein the author covers the vastness of the sexual complexity. Interestingly, Tandon complicates the private/public dichotomy by seeing it as moral values of upper class and a constituent of social power and explores how Kothis create an independent personal/private world for themselves in public spaces—like in streets, parks, etc—amidst society condemning same-sex practices. Discussing about the creation of liminal space in public realms, the author argues about non-sovereign agency—referring to Krause (2015)—which is not performed out of autonomous consciousness and is moulded by modes and arrangements of power. So, non-sovereign agency does not disrupt any structure or status quo but make multiple structures in their negotiation with the state, family and economy and the author explicates agency through the language—Farsi. She argues that Farsi language like helmet (condom), cheesa (beautiful), etc is instrumental in making Kothis as community and helps them circumvent public and private distinction and realisation of their inner hidden selves.
Besides interrogating the term ‘MSM’ which fixes fluid identities of sexual minorities into namable category, the author provides a nuanced understanding of ‘coming out’ that it is not an experience in which one’s sexuality is made known to parents or friends rather it was the instance of private sexual encounters in which Kothis became aware of their sexuality and spatially experienced (p. 105). It was experienced in one’s house, park, street or deserted place or expressed among friends from the queer community. The author also shows how marriage—heterosexual—further complicates and provides ambiguity to their same-sex identity. Importantly, the author stresses that if Kothis live in multiple selves—married to cis-gender women and perform masculinity and yet, at other times have intimate relationships with men—nevertheless, in the web of their homosociality, sexual is not the prominent impulse rather it is stimulated by the need for care, relationality, sociality, to reduce daily stress, etc. The author too grasps the imperatives—to live a life of dignity for themselves and their birth family, to protect the job, etc—that drive Kothis to become a man. The author acknowledges the impossibility of discrete selfhoods and instead focuses on the processual self in the play of multiple selves. If the author is critical of reification of the category—MSMs—by NGOs, nonetheless, she highlights how NGOs and community-based organisations provide a safety net for them to express themselves such as drop-in centre in Bharosa was a space where along with flow of information, Kothis pursued their desire, formed alternate sociality, etc. Modern sexual subjectivities thus, formed are experienced spatially and transiently. The author aptly discusses the contradiction in contemporary times that if scrapping of IPC 377 brought optimism among queer community in 2018 in the realm of law, however, in the medico-socio-cultural space, they were included in the vocabulary of risk (p. 155) via National Health Policy 2017. She concretises this paradox by throwing light on the authoritarian, insensitive and apathetic manner in which UPSACS made it mandatory to link people’s Aadhar for test and avail Antiretroviral Therapy and flouted ethical principles by revealing the identity of the positive person.
Sixth chapter entitled ‘Queer Community: Disjuncture Between Political and Politics’ comprehends the major arguments of all the chapters. As the publication of the book coincided with post ‘COVID-19’ period where sexually marginalised were subjected to punitive measures in the pretext of containing it, enormous expectations from the book emanates. Critical questions that were unexplored include what can we learn from the HIV/AIDS control programme while proceeding to contain COVID-19, how do we draw a connection between HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 in terms of surveillance measures and in the analogy of ‘virus’ and its implications on the sexual subalterns. Although the author has marshalled in critiquing biomedicine’s discursive projects which were circulated through public health campaigns that seeks to control intimate acts of MSMs by citing the practice of oral and anal sex, however, a missing link here is feminist critique of science including biomedicine and its knowledge production. Martin (1989), in particular, has argued that medical knowledge production is not value-free, rational, objective and cannot be insulated from social context in which knowledge is produced. She exposed that there are wider social, political, cultural forces dictating how medicine does its work and how the unhealthy are dealt with by giving the example of WHO recognising female hysteria. Waldby (1996) too succinctly took up this strand to demonstrate the reproduction of heterosexual values in the medical knowledge production of HIV/AIDS, specially explaining its transmission. She showed, how within medical texts, heterosexual man’s body is presented as ‘self-enclosed, impermeable’ in which a rigid boundary is maintained between inside the body and outside the world which avoids the transmission of HIV whereas, in contrast, a gay man’s body is presented as ‘permeable’—courtesy anal sex—thus, depicts it as vulnerable as well as responsible for spreading the infection. She unravels that biomedicine is informed by preconceived/biased ideas of society that it is only gay people who indulge in anal sex whereas in reality heterosexual couples too practice it. Even for Foucault, diseases are not based on the discoveries of truth rather it is the ideological, economic and political imperatives that distorts certain knowledge or contribute to make certain kind of knowledge. Third, even if the author mentions the fluid identity of Kothis, strikingly, she stresses on how Kothis disdain hijras and refrain from referring themselves as transgender, etc. However, the recent work of Kumar (2018) contests this boundary maintenance between Kothis and hijras by showing how Kothis are also initiated into guru–chela relationships like hijras, besides existence of some uninitiated Kothis. Initiated Kothis can become hijras by giving up male identity permanently or temporarily by migrating to the bigger cities and cross-dressing (p. 224). Notwithstanding these limitations, this book is a significant contribution in sexuality and health studies.