Cosmopolitan Sexuality
Gender, Embodiments, Biopolitics in India

Studies the ethnographic and anthropological studies of varied embodied projects in Indian metropolises.

Ahonaa Roy (Author)

9781108490443, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 February 2023

264 pages
23.7 x 16.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.49 kg

'Theoretically sophisticated yet full of ethnographic detail, this book is a major contribution on several levels - to our understanding of the changes sweeping through contemporary India, but also through much of the rest of the world. Globalisation, the author shows, is not just an external force but penetrates to the core of both the self, the body and the emotions. Individuals and groups who rebel against established norms of sexuality are redefining those very terms in so doing. The interplay between modernity and tradition expresses itself in the complex connections between desire, self- representation, and intimacy on the one hand and the wider impact of capitalism and the market economy on the other.' Anthony Giddens, King's College London

Cosmopolitan Sexuality articulates the ethnographic and anthropological studies of varied embodied projects in Indian metropolises. With particular reference to the city of Bombay, it draws evidences of gendered representations – their desires, appeal and aspirations to be and to express their sense of self. It attempts to establish arguments to a deconstructive notion of any fixation of identity categories and build a robust and complex understanding of sexual experiences, love, emotions and interpersonal relationships; an unusual way of local as well as global patterns that are culturally scathed in the contemporary new India. The book is relevant to contemporary embodiment studies – the invasive means of desiring corporeal reconstruction on one hand, and dress, ornamentation, and makeup on the other. Transgressive politics are discursively and materially constructed to their everydayness and their unique ways of re-representation. 'Health' is viewed in new dynamics of shared knowledges and communicative practices that has enabled building fresh arguments around community and public health, with new visions of the anthropologies of empowerment.

List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Bioengineering, Beauty and Racial Sensibility
3. Contesting Violence, Constructing Power
4. Festival, Spectacle, Eroticism
5. Biopolitics and Biosocial Citizenship
6. Performative Participation, Sexual Health and Community Development
7. Cosmopolitanism: Rights, Citizenry and the Culture of Representation
8. Postscript
Glossary
Index.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Anthropology [JHM], Sociology: work & labour [JHBL], Sociology [JHB], Sociology & anthropology [JH], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ]