Gender, Sexuality, Decolonization

Ahonaa Roy teaches at the School of Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. A social anthropologist, with MA and DPhil (University of Sussex), she previously taught at the Delhi School of Economics, Department of Sociology. She was previously appointed at the Ministry of Health and has been member of the National Urban Health Mission, Government of India. Ahonaa has been part of several projects with the United Nations, USAID and Government of India. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, medical anthropology, community health and sexual health, anthropology of the body and embodiment, postcolonial studies, postmodern feminist studies and Southern theories. Her book The Making of the Cosmopolitan is forthcoming in 2021.

• Introduction PART I. Colonial Knowledge and Postcolonial Multiplicities 1. Religion, Ritual Power, Exclusion and Marginality: Gender Transgressive Shivashaktis in Telangana, Southern India 2. Uncertain Grammars, Ambiguous Desires: Towards a Sexual Politic of Indeterminacy in Sri Lanka 3. Twenty-Five Years after Dominic D’Souza: What Happens when your Queer Icon Refuses to Be? 4. The Iconography of Hindu(ized) Hijras: Idioms of Hijra Representation in Northern India 5. ‘A Normal Person Cannot Be Made Queer’: The Immorality Act (Amendment) Commission of 1968 in Apartheid South Africa PART II. Transnational Migrations and Diasporic Linkages 6. "I Want a Yaar": Pakistani Muslim American Gay Men and Transnational Same-Sex Sexual Cultures in the West 7. Decolonizing the Postcolonial Body in Diasporic Time and Space: South Asians in the Caribbean 8. Intersectionality and South Asian Non-Normative Sexualities: The Case of South Asian Lesbians and Bisexual Women in the United Kingdom 9. Trans/Queer South Asian Diaspora in the United Kingdom: Whose "Regimes of the Normal" Does "Queer" Critique? PART III. Global Economization of Sexualities and Gender Transgressing Politics 10. Trans South: Practical Bases for Trans Internationalism 11. On the Limits and Possibilities of LGBTI Politics: Contextualizing Socio-Political Violence and Political Transitions in South America 12. Understanding Gender in Nepal: Concepts and Practices 13. Operationalizing the "New" Pakistani Transgender Citizen: Legal Gendered Grammars and Trans Frames of Feeling 14. The Political Economy of Empowerment: Microfinance, Middle Class and the Sexual Subculture in Contemporary Bangladesh

‘This is an important and groundbreaking book which brings together scholarly work on gender, sexuality and sexual politics from across South Asia and its diasporas. Interrogating the colonial and postcolonial contexts as well as the possibilities for radical futures, the essays demonstrate the power of ethnography in throwing new light on sexual identity and politics.’Katy J. Gardner, Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London, UK‘This timely anthology calls for a thorough recalibration of the epistemologies through which we understand sexuality and sexual politics in global South Asia. The essays critically engage postcolonial, transnational, and de-colonial critiques to ask a set of provocative questions around what it means to produce theory from the south. The volume centres "trouble, breakages and ruptures" to explore both political and aesthetic practices of negotiation and subversion. With a firm accent on plurality, the anthology offers new possibilities of negotiating racialized, sexualized, and gendered forms of resistance. This will be an invaluable resource, not least because it brings into conversation a remarkable set of interlocutors engaged in the critical work of border crossing.’ Dina M Siddiqi, Clinical Associate Professor, Global Liberal Studies, New York University, USA‘There has been a surge of sorts in South Asian scholarship on sexual and gender diversity, but this anthology is like no other: it features an astonishing array of incisive contributions from across the subcontinent that engage the reader with the latest in decolonial, intersectional and radical thinking about sexual and gender-non-conformity. A towering, once-in-a-generation achievement!’Vanja Hamzić, Senior Lecturer, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK