Options
Sexy State in Sexed-Up Subjects
Journal
Connecting, Rethinking and Embracing Difference
Date Issued
2019-01-01
Author(s)
Biswas, Arpita Phukan
Abstract
The reversal of the High Court declaration on Section 377 on the Indian Penal Code (IPC) by the Supreme Court on December 2013 raised a fresh round of debates on the validity of the law which criminalizes all forms of carnal intercourse ‘against the order of nature’. One of the most provoking aspects of this judgment was the distinction that the Supreme Court makes between sexual acts, and sexual orientation and gender identity. Through a close reading of the Supreme Court judgement, this chapter tries to interpellate the mechanisms by which bodies gain materiality within rubrics of state legibility. To understand this, I look at the dualism produced between practice and identity so as to understand what this dualism serves. In this chapter, I argue that the sexuality and gender discourse is sedimented with an apriori relationship drawn between subjects with the modern nation state. While this has led to various exclusions of native gender locations marked by caste and class aspects of sexuality, a mandatory subject-position plays into the regulatory mechanisms of a gendered state. In other words, subjectformation and state-formation are co-constitutive mechanisms and are complicit in the production of a heterosexist-homophobic regime. I therefore argue that the contention over sexual practice is actually a suggestion of a contestation over subjectivities as mandated by the modern nation state, and marks the exclusions that underlie the arrangement of powers within the modern nation state.
Subjects