Sexual States

Front matter

SEXUAL

GOVERNANCE AND THE STRUGGLE OVER THE ANTISODOMY LAW IN INDIA

> STATES

CHAPTER 5. Pivoting toward the State: Phase One of the Struggle against Section 377 101

CHAPTER 6. State versus Sexuality: Decriminalizing and Recriminalizing Homosexuality in the Postliberalized Context 126

Notes 165 Bibliography 193 Index 211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As I get ready to send this book out into the world, it brings a moment of pause, an opportunity to reflect on the journeys the book represents. One journey began when I first came across a brief blurb in 2002 that an organization called Naz Foundation had launched a public interest litigation against the antisodomy law in India. On the road, I came into contact with new communities, traveled to new sites and ventured into new arenas of fieldwork, which collectively inform the critiques of states and governance that are the focus of this book. Yet, even as this book draws to a close, the other journey, to decriminalize homosexuality, remains unfinished. The appeals to the Supreme Court are underway and it is unclear how and when the court will weigh in on the 2013 ruling upholding the antisodomy law. More heartening, though, the broader struggle for sexual and gender justice, of which the legal campaign against the antisodomy law was just one aspect, continues more energetically than ever before.

In many ways, this book could not have existed without the input of the people who are part of this broader struggle, especially those who proceed with the understanding that undoing the social injustices of sexual orientation are contingent on undoing the harms of caste and class inequalities, religious discrimination, nationalisms, racialisms, gender hierarchies, and intolerances of gender expression. Indeed, this book takes inspiration from them. It is always a pleasure to be in conversation with Arvind Narrain—something to learn, something to share. Gautam Bhan has consistently supported this project; Alok Gupta’s sharp and critical bent has been refreshing. In Delhi I was fortunate to have the insights of Ponni Arasu, Pramada Menon, and Jaya Sharma, who also generously shared loads of material with me. I learned from Saleem Kidwai and benefited from my discussions with Anjali Gopalan. Thanks also to Nivedita Menon for making time for lively conversations during the trips to Delhi.

Travels to Mumbai led me to Chayanika Shah, Vivek Diwan, Geeta Kumana, and Vikram Doctor, who without hesitation gave me access to material from his personal archive. Meeting with Ashok Row Kavi is always informative. My thanks to Anand Grover at Lawyer’s Collective for being liberal with his time despite his many commitments. I am especially glad that the research process took me to Flavia Agnes’s office, for she is someone whose work I much respect. On the way, Meena Gopal and Nandini Manjrekar have become interlocutors. A few more people to single out: in Delhi, Shaleen Rakesh, who was the former Naz Foundation legal representative and my first point of contact, and Aditya Bondyopadhyay, in Bangalore, Elarvathi Manohar, in Chennai, L. Ramakrishnan and Sunil Menon, and in Kolkata, Pawan Dhall. Not least, a collective thanks to the many individuals and representatives of organizations, both the supporters as well as the detractors of the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality, whose input directly or indirectly contributed to this book.

A Fulbright Senior Research Award allowed me to conduct a chunk of the research for this project. It remains an important U.S. taxpayer initiative at a time when funding for social science research projects, especially ones that are qualitative and based elsewhere, is being whittled down. My gratitude to the Fulbright staff in Washington and in Delhi. Simmons College, where I work, provided additional support along the way, including monies from the President’s Fund for Excellence, the Faculty Fund for Research, and a course release from the Dean’s Office, and Milo Kluk, Caroline Narby, and Heather Mooney helped me with the nitty-gritty aspects of the manuscript. My appreciation also to my supportive colleagues in my department and at Simmons.

The process of publishing represents another milestone. I was most fortunate to have two perceptive, exacting reviewers who nonetheless managed to be constructive in their responses. I am most grateful to both of them for helping me write a better book. Ken Wissoker was supportive of this project; I relied repeatedly on his brilliance in translating the reviewer responses and helping me hear them. It has been a pleasure viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS working with Ken and the rest of the team at Duke, and especially Elizabeth Ault and Jessica Ryan. Amy Morgenstern’s editorial skill aided in transforming the beginning and ending of the book in ways that were edifying, and Judith Hoover has given the book its finishing touches.

In between all of the research, the writing, and the quest to publish are the audiences with whom you can, if lucky, have fruitful conversations. Thanks especially to the colleagues and students at Brandeis University, Brown University, Connecticut College, Harvard University, Lund University (Sweden), Northeastern University, St. Lawrence University (thank you, Danielle Egan), Rutgers University, Tufts University, University of Chicago, University of Heidelberg, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Yale University.

More particularly, during the making of a book you look to people whose opinions you trust. I relied on S. Charusheela’s keen intellect and friendship; I benefited much from conversations with her and her feedback on chapters of this book. I was equally fortunate to have the discerning eyes of Ania Loomba, Srimati Basu, and Geeta Patel on portions of the manuscript; Ania’s clear-sighted comments, Srimati’s acuity, and Geeta’s incisiveness helped the manuscript in so many ways. I turned time and time again to Srimati and wish to express my gratitude to her. I would like to especially thank Anjali Arondekar for her astute readings and thorough assessments and Inderpal Grewal for her invaluable insights and encouragement during the crafting of this book. With colleagues such as Héctor Carrillo, Lawrence Cohen, Danielle Egan, Kathy Ferguson, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz and friends Angana Chatterjee, Harleen Singh, and Avinash Singh I had rich and rewarding conversations. I thank these friends especially for their warmth and affection. Kazi K. Ashraf’s infinite intellectual curiosity allowed him to comment on portions of the manuscript, despite the distance between our disciplines. My engagements with him sustain me and remain a bright spot.

Then there are those who support you in ways that are indirect, helping you live beyond the intellectual in ways that enrich it. Many thanks to Fernanda Ghi, Guillermo Merlo, and Ana and Joel Massacote for fostering the joy of movement and music in my life.

Finally, the people whose impact on your life is immeasurable. Deepak, Manisha, Taranee, and Anchita provide a home in Delhi, and Nargis and Manohar Mhatre take care of me in Mumbai. Sangeeta K.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Malhotra, Vanita Seth, and Rajshree Kampani continue to be sisters to me. My family in the United States—Monica, Anil, Manu, Poonam, Gautam, Jennifer, and the not quite tykes anymore, Kabir, Resham, Arjun, Sia, and Vikram—have my gratitude for their love, nurturance, and gaiety. My parents, Manorama and Rajinder Puri, light up my life with their infinite affections and tenderness. Most of all, my gratitude to Rohin Mhatre, the creative nonconformist, who stands by me each day witha seemingly endless capacity for love and caring. Thank you a thousand times.

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 1 Governing Sexuality, Constituting States

Bharatiya Bar Girls Union (Indian Bar Girls Union), Nityananda Hall, Mumbai, field observations:

In a large hall in Mumbai on an overcast July afternoon in 2005, some one hundred women have gathered to react to an imminent statewide ban on dance bars. The bar dancers are young, mostly in their midtwenties, dressed neatly in salwaar suits, trousers, and saris. Several dance bar owners are also present, not far from where I sit, but it’s the women’s voices that reverberate throughout the hall as each steps to the microphone. One woman wonders how bar dancers could be robbed of their jobs because of what they wear while performing, since the women in Hindi films (aka Bollywood) and discos dress so much more revealingly. Why, then, doesn’t the government take notice of the film actresses? What about the women who perform in discos? Another woman counters state officials’ accusations that dancing in bars is “easy money,” lamenting the hardships of the work, the need to take loans from taxi drivers at times, among other indignities. Other bar dancers are intent on distinguishing themselves from sex workers. Many of them wonder about the government’s claim to be “helping them” by closing the bars."

With less than a month to go before some seventy-five thousand bar dancers lose their jobs due to a hastily passed state law, women’s concerns, anxieties, and anger are palpable at the union meeting. Mere months before, a prominent elected official unexpectedly proposed such a ban on dance bars—where fully clothed groups of women danced to popular Hindi film songs for a male clientele—initially applying only to the state capital, Mumbai, but then encompassing the entire western Indian state of Maharashtra. It is puzzling, the women note, that state officials singled out dance bars over brothels, Bollywood, and bars and discos at posh hotels. Even though the bars had been a staple of the provincial state’s nightlife for over two decades, subject to regulation, and a significant source of revenue, officials were now stridently condemning these bars for “corrupting rural youth” and “damaging the (state’s) culture.”?

Urging attention to these inconsistencies, the bar dancers at the meeting ask why dance bars, why now, in order to understand (and overturn) the regional state’s edict. But interpreting the Maharashtra state’s capricious actions is not easy, not least because of the confoundingly arbitrary discourses justifying the ban. The initial allegations of cultural depravity soon give way to criticisms that dancers are making “easy money,” then projections that they are helpless victims of sex trafficking who need to be rescued, views hotly contested by the women themselves. Indeed state pronouncements oscillating between blaming and saving women and officials’ empty promises of public assistance for the thousands who would be rendered unemployed lead to additional furious speculations at the meeting about the state’s intents and irrationalities.

Some eight hundred miles north, in the nation’s capital, New Delhi, another struggle for sexual justice is pivoting toward the state in ways that, too, are surfacing inconsistencies in discourses and practices of governance. Under way since 2001, these efforts are aimed at decriminalizing homosexuality by overturning the nationwide antisodomy law, Section 377, first introduced by the British colonial state in 1860 and retained in the postcolonial penal code. Unlike the bar dancers reacting to the proposed shutdown, this struggle was initiated by Naz Foundation (India) Trust, an organization established to fight HIV/AIDS, as part of a strategy to seek rights and protections for same-sex sexualities, beginning with a writ petition filed in the Delhi High Court against Section 377. As the legal process unfolds, these petitioners are foregrounding incongruities in how Section 377 is applied—for example, the law is being used to harass and extort from vulnerable same-sex sexual subjects— and the irrationalities of administration, whereby the government is opposing decriminalization but the state-run National AIDS Control Organization is favoring it.

Coming to grips with these messy discourses, inconstant practices, and competing laws and policies through the edicts against dance bars or homosexuality underscores that states are fragmented and deeply subjective. Further, if subjectivity is redefined to mean not just inconsistency and bias but also the passionate, the affective, and especially the sexual, then it animates a more critical view of the states’ injunctions on dance bars and same-sex sexual practices.’ Recognizing states as subjective expands the focus on the state’s impact on sexuality to asking how these instances of regulating sexuality serve states. Insofar as states are neither autochthonous entities nor mere material realities, a position I take, awareness shifts to how these preoccupations with managing sexual practices, forms of sexual labor, and such are discursively producing “the state” and serving to achieve state-effect (after, Timothy Mitchell).* In other words, these instances suggest that governing sexuality helps sustain the illusion that states are a normal feature of social life, unified and rational entities, intrinsically distinct from society, and indispensable to maintaining social order.

Most pressing, the issue of dance bars, which I discuss but briefly, and the criminalization of homosexuality that is the focus of this book underscore the expanding significance of sexuality to states. Unfolding as they are in the thick of liberalization’s aftermath in India, these sites compellingly signal how regulating sexuality through a variety of mechanisms assumes importance, especially at a time when states are understood to be in decline. That is, states are seen to be diminishing due to the erosion of public services, the relentless drive to privatize, the ubiquity of market-based logics that are exacerbated by transnational flows of capital, and the pressures of transnational political structures, such as the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. While the sexual struggles emphasized in this book have kept Indian state institutions, practices, and discourses in the analytical foreground to an extent, widespread perceptions elsewhere of the scaling back of the state due to the effects of neoliberalism have intensified attention to sexuality in other sites of governance: personal relationships, consumerism, the media, and more. Useful as these studies are, the cases energizing this book show that regional and national states may be retreating from some aspects of social life, but the mandate to govern sexuality perpetuates the state as central, even crucial. The charades of the Maharashtra government’s edict and the criminalization of homosexuality are cautionary accounts of how states continue to thrive by leaning heavily on sexuality’s arguable potential to engender widespread social chaos.

With the concept of sexual states, this book advances the argument that governing sexuality helps account for the idea and inevitability of states, especially when they are in flux. It shows that regulating sexuality in its various dimensions, such as behavior, marriage, sexual health and disease, fertility, sexual labor, media representations, and the sex industry, are crucial mechanisms through which states are generated and the expansions and modifications in governance are justified. And it hones the understanding that the institutions and agencies, spaces, routinized practices, and discourses composing states are thoroughly imbued by considerations of sexuality. Efforts to decriminalize homosexuality and other sites of contestation flanking the book—closing dance bars, discourses of sexual violence, and policies against migration from Bangladesh— are crucial in demystifying states, foregrounding as they are the iterative, multivalent forms of governance giving heft to the illusion of states. Sustained attention to these instances offers insights into states’ impacts on vulnerable groups while also revealing how these and other constituencies become implicated in upholding them.

Useful as the issues of dance bars and other cases explored at the end of the book are, it is the protracted struggle to decriminalize homosexuality in the contemporary Indian context that provides insights into sexuality’s constitutive effects on states. When Naz Foundation sought the modification of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the antisodomy law that declares “carnal intercourse against the order of nature,” so that it no longer pertained to adult, consensual, same-sex activity, it was not the first attempt at decriminalizing homosexuality. That honor belonged to the AIDS Bhedbhav Virodhi Andolan’s (AIDS Anti-Discrimination Movement, ABVA) attempt to repeal Section 377 dating back to 1994. But Naz Foundation’s legal initiative is distinctive and worthy of sustained attention because it inspired a national-level campaign, beginning gradually, with the first cross-country coalition of activists and organizations aimed at securing rights for sexual and gender minorities.

Unlike the bar dancers’ turn to the Maharashtra government as a result of its edict or the resort to national and Delhi-based state institutions during a watershed in sexual violence against women, Naz Foundation’s turn to the state was premeditated. Seeking to use the antisodomy law as a threshold for long overdue rights and equal citizenship for same-sexualities, it attempted to engage a variety of state sites at the national, regional, and local levels, including the courts, government, and the Delhi Police. Parsing “the state,” the Naz Foundation intervention gestured right from the start toward provisional and contextual understandings. As the campaign escalated, it yielded fresh insights, such as that the breadth of statecraft can get smaller as well as larger, from the local dynamics of policing to regionally specific patterns of governance, national-level agencies, and transnational discourses, and that what counts as the state is ever contingent.”

Presenting a rich, complicated, and performative arena animated by numerous constituencies, the Naz Foundation—led engagements of sexuality and state are best apprehended through fieldwork. One aspect of my research was focused on the Naz Foundation-—led legal challenge, the gradual emergence of a nationwide political campaign, and the positions of supporters and detractors; the other was aimed at unraveling “the state” by pursuing the antisodomy law through a variety of state institutions, agencies, and practices. Spanning five major metropolitan sites—Bangaluru, Chennai, Kolkota, Mumbai, and New Delhi—my fieldwork also included Naz Foundation; its legal representative, Lawyers’ Collective HIV/AIDS Unit; a range of sexuality rights, children’s rights, and nonfunded groups; and HIV/AIDS organizations with a stake in this conflict. These forays unearthed concerns about the nature and impact of the antisodomy law and, more pressing, cautions about locating the state at the center of this activism.

Contesting the State: Sexuality, Law, and Reform

Naz Foundation’s recourse to the state shadows histories of sexual regulation and reform in India. Pointing to this arc, Patricia Uberoi notes that questions of sexuality have been at the heart of the social reform agenda, its debates and contestations, in the colonial and postcolonial periods.° Others too have emphasized a tight link between sexuality and legislative social reform starting in the nineteenth century.’ For the most part, though, such deliberations over the “woman question,” or, for that matter, over marriage, pro-natalism, or population control, have been pegged to nation and nationalisms, while institutional analyses of state and sexuality are harder to find.* Further, state is frequently collapsed into nation, as seen repeatedly in treatments of sexual violence and trauma during the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.° In contrast, revised readings of this inaugural moment of the Indian state by Veena Das and Christine Keating’s retelling of the framing of the Indian Constitution emphasize the weaving together of the social and sexual contracts, thereby helping reinsert questions of state and sexuality at the heart of Indian postcolonial history.’

State institutions are the hub of contestations over sexuality in contemporary India more acutely than ever before. Such contestations— related not just to homosexuality but also to HIV/AIDS, sex work, sex trafficking, sexual violence, population control, and media representations, among others—play out intensively in the Indian context, making itan especially useful lens to apprehend whatis relevant in other settings as well." Anxieties about obscenity in media representations or art, for example, have been defined in terms of the need to protect the moral and social fabric of the Indian nation butare actually channeled through local police stations and the courts.” Citizens and representatives of political and religious groups routinely register complaints; reportedly thousands of such complaints are pending, and although few prosecutions occur, state institutions remain the focal points of redress.”

More than any other institution, law and the attempts to enforce, reform, and redefine it in ways that match the aspirations of ordinary people, what Nandini Sundar calls law struggles, has come to define the interface between state and sexuality.* Not surprisingly, then, ABVA’s abortive attempt at repealing Section 377 and Naz Foundation’s subsequent intervention worked squarely within this paradigm. The antisodomy law had been increasingly commanding center stage due to the heightened contestations around same-sex sexualities amid the impending HIV/AIDS crisis. Marked by greater governmental scrutiny of same-sex practices and identities, deemed as high risk, this period also witnessed increased countermobilizations to protect people from the intrusions of governance. Increasingly Section 377 was identified as the symbol of institutionalized homophobia and an instrument of legal and extralegal persecution. Additionally, insofar as it criminalizes same-sex sexual practices and, by implication, gay, lesbian, and queer subjects, it was also seen as the barrier to securing necessary rights and protections for them.

Conceived as a legal strategy to be waged procedurally in the Delhi High Court, the Naz Foundation intervention was from the beginning circumscribed by its pivot to the state. Aimed at persuading the court to decriminalize homosexuality, the writ highlighted the antisodomy law’s ill effects on same-sex sexualities and, most important, the violation of constitutional rights. In so doing it surfaced questions about the potentials but also the limitations of its bent, arguments, and strategies. For one thing, the writ sought to expose the inconsistencies and biases of state policies, whereby some state institutions acknowledge and serve same-sex sexualities even as the law criminalizes them. Yet its principal arguments were couched in a grammar of reasonableness: that decriminalization would ensure better public health and effective regulation, thus raising the greater concern for me about the extent to which decriminalization might actually lead to strengthening governance.

Curious about this and the complex relationship between state and sexuality that was emerging as a result of Naz Foundation’s challenge to the antisodomy law, I spoke with a number of activists and lawyers who were part of the legal process. More and more intrigued about how the state was being imagined through the writ petition and how offcials were representing notions of state, governance, and sexuality, I visited a number of state institutions and agencies in the first phase of my fieldwork. Looking to gain insight into the positions of the respondents (Delhi Police, Union Government of India, and others) named in the Naz Foundation writ and also the bureaucratic procedures and mechanisms through which such positions are crafted brought me up close to the state and the intricacies of governing Section 377.

SEXUALIZING THE STATE: CONCEPTUAL FRAMINGS

Alongside surfacing the inconsistencies and incongruities of state agencies and institutions, this ethnographic view also confirmed the need to dismantle the overarching idea of “the state.” It dovetailed with poststructuralist understandings of the state as culturally and historically produced and reliant on active fashioning through ideas and practices, giving it the illusion of being monolithic, coherent, rational, permanent, and irrefutably “there.” Seeing the visits to police stations, gathering of police crime records, and other occasions through this critical lens in fact laid bare the state as fragmented, messy, contingent, and inconsistent. For instance, it raised questions taken up in chapter 3 about how to contend with a law that was intended to criminalize same-sex sexual behavior regardless of consent but that in fact has been used primarily to prosecute sexual assault on children. This approach also emphasized the need to interrogate how administering this code (among others) was continually breathing life into the state.

It became clear that the discursive illusion of the state could be confronted only through an investigation into the nitty-gritties of governance, their pedestrian, iterative qualities. Following Foucault’s emphasis on studying the micro practices of power affirmed the insight that engaging the state critically means attending to its constitutive elements, that is, the discourses and micro practices of governance, reports, documents, interactions, procedures, and more. Intent on uncovering this banal and therefore influential thick web, I became especially interested in the minutiae of Section 377, its case law and enforcement as also the ideological production of crime data, meanings ascribed in the government’s legal responses, exchanges during the hearings in the Delhi High Court, and so on.

More crucially, my fieldwork raised questions about the role of sexuality in ways that could not be satisfied by seeing these discursive practices only as biased and inconsistent. For instance, my search for data, which is where chapter 2 begins, revealed that the difficulty of accessing statistics on Section 377 in contrast to the glut of tables on (hetero)sexual crime on women is not adequately explained by erratic institutional practices. Indeed, moments throughout the fieldwork reinforced the insight that the domain of sexuality blurs putative distinctions between the public and the private, or the political and affective aspects of the state.” Law, the seemingly dispassionate arm of the state, it turns out is colored, for instance, by justices’ affects, passions, and anxieties that became evident during the Supreme Court hearings discussed in chapter 6. Trailing the broader spectrum of institutional practices and discourses, though, suggests going beyond the scope of law to unearthing sexuality’s far-reaching significance to governance and, in effect, the state.

Thus, although the Naz Foundation-led efforts to decriminalize homosexuality were invoking conventional understandings of the state, the struggle inadvertently triggered an analytic of the sexual state. First, it

IO CHAPTER ONE brought home the long-standing insight in feminist and sexuality studies that states are deeply subjective, preoccupied with regulating sexuality especially among vulnerable constituencies. Reaching for the nuanced analyses in this body of work paved the way for seeing that in fact sexuality impacts states just as much as states seek to define sexual normality, discipline bodies, and control populations.” Coming to grips with these complexities required shifting meanings of sexuality away from notions of individual or collective identity toward its structural connotations, as a domain at the level of relations, institutions, and more.”° As such, the task expanded to tracking how applying the antisodomy law serves the state and, more broadly, seeing the state from the angle of sexuality.

Second, the view from the ground exposed sexuality’s role in helping produce state-effect. The government’s first legal response to the Naz Foundation writ was telling in this regard. Analyzed in chapter 5, this reply showcases how sexuality’s seeming threat to society is used to produce and affirm the role of the state. Another pivotal moment at the National Crime Records Bureau (see chapter 2), which I visited to get a sense of the scope and circumstances in which crime under Section 377 is recorded, was equally illustrative. An “inside” view of this state agency revealed bit by bit not only sexuality’s impact on its various aspects but also how these sexualized processes, spaces, functions, and interpersonal interactions cumulate into an idea of the state and the mandate to govern.

Third, a comprehensive view of the antisodomy law showed that concerns with sexuality implicitly and explicitly propel governance, often in incremental ways—as in the pattern of expanding judicial interpretations of the crime that Section 377 ought to cover. Equally important, the upshot was that not just juridical but also biopolitical and neoliberal rationalities are implicated in applying the antisodomy provision. This, contrary to the fact that sexuality is often left out of theories of biopolitics, with which I take issue in chapter 2, and that the state is typically overlooked in notions of neoliberalism, a point I reconsider in chapter 6.” In other words, issuing from this critical appraisal of the sexual state is the conceptual challenge of contending with multiple rationalities of governance rather than taking a teleological view of it (whereby neoliberal forms are seen as supplanting juridical and biopolitical modes).

Coming to grips with the sexual state in these ways highlighted the fourth aspect: that ordinary people also participate in animating it. Com-

Governing Sexuality, Constituting States II monplace criticisms and ridicule of the state abound, yet it is difficult to sidestep the state in the search for justice, particularly for marginalized groups.” Vulnerable to the effects of state power, they are also likely to become implicated in fetishizing the state.” Setting into motion the legal process lasting for over a decade, the campaign to decriminalize homosexuality and the entire constellation of actors, constituents, opinions, and criticisms it prompted spun around projections of the state. Thus Naz Foundation’s interpellation of the state as antagonist and protagonist mattered, as did more far-reaching critiques of the state offered by the coalition Voices against Section 377 (considered in chapter 6). Understanding the inciting of the state in these complex ways brings to light that in dispute between the Delhi High Court’s decision decriminalizing homosexuality and the Supreme Court’s subsequent overruling of it was the role and reach of the state.

Generating an ethnographically grounded appraisal of the sexual state yielded additional insights around which this book is constructed, beginning with the point that Section 377 is not, nor could it be, the principal law through which same-sex sexualities are governed. Even though the antisodomy law was intended to curb same-sex sexual activity (and other behavior seen as transgressive), a review of legal history indicates that it has for the most part not been used to prosecute adult consensual activity. Rather sexuality’s significance to the state links a whole nexus of laws, policies, and discourses—among them the anti-sex trafficking act and lower order laws, including vagrancy and public nuisance, that are easier to enforce and therefore likely to have greater impact than the antisodomy law on same-sex sexualities, especially those vulnerable due to their gender expression and social class.

Pressed further still, it is debatable that sexuality’s effects are limited to any one expression, pointing instead to an approach that goes beyond troubling states’ heteronormative underpinnings.” Taking an integrated view of sexuality’s disparate iterations has the distinct advantage of providing thoroughgoing critiques of the state, especially in contexts where the dualities of heterosexuality and homosexuality have not been foundational.” The examples of the dance bars, agitations against (hetero)sexual violence, and attempts to stall immigration from Bangladesh, alongside the struggle to decriminalize homosexuality, fruitfully

I2 CHAPTER ONE expose contiguities between sexuality’s various iterations and highlight its effects on states even when not easily perceptible, as in the case of emigrants from Bangladesh.

Gesturing to neither a single law nor a specific aspect of sexuality, the analysis also throws into question the premise that Section 377 imperils only, or mainly, homosexual subjects. The campaign against the law presumed that Indian legal history tracks closely with Foucauldian genealogies of the homosexual, who is seen as brought into history through institutions such as law only to be persecuted. But if, as noted earlier and explored fully in chapter 3, such a pattern is not borne out by case law, then it throws into doubt the presumed subject of this statute. More gravely, the ethnography examined in chapter 4 points toward the ways the law’s enforcement is likely to target hijras and, significantly, religious minorities, especially Muslims, regardless of their sexual practices. Accounting for how some religious minority groups are racialized and pejoratively queered, the discussion provides a broadened understanding of the range of subjects impacted by the antisodomy statute. As such, a close analysis of this law, coupled with the other cases I consider, illustrates the need to bring “least powerful” constituencies—on the basis of marginalized social class and caste, sexual orientation, gender expression, and religion—and the numerous points of regulation into the same field of analysis, without of course collapsing relevant differences.