Beyond ‘Sexuality’ (?)

2007

Amity Media & Journalism Review, 2011

This study attempts to track and unravel the inherent dichotomy between a feminized male, his sexual preferences and the inevitability of leading a fractured life, replete with multiple identities. It outlines and identifies different levels of inter-personal communication and cuts across the lifespan of a feminized male. The study is contextual to their relationships and the culture of Lucknow, the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh in India, long considered the gay capital of India. Kothis, a community of self-identified feminized males, assume the role of passive partners in a homosexual relationship. With preconceived notions about the moral and behavioral reasons for their feminized mannerisms and choice of male partners, the larger heterosexual community has no place for any heart-to-heart communication, thus invoking distrust, shame, guilt, self-condemnation and self-abuse.

The Word Hoard, 2012

2013

For their conviction in me and their continuous emotional and practical support to give my 'intimate' project an academic shape, I extend my sincerest gratitude to my supervisors, Shelley Budgeon and Louise Brown. For inspiring me to conceptualize a sociology of intimacy and for believing that this research is both plausible and desirable, I am indebted to my teachers in Kolkata, Abhijit Mitra, Prasanta Ray, Bula Bhadra and Monjir Ghosh who taught me to live sociology in everyday life. I am very grateful to the School of Government and Society, University of Birmingham for granting me a bursary to carry out this research. My friends and subjects of this research whose stories of intimacy are mine too, wrote with me my thesis through their narratives. I thank each one of them for granting me a part in their intimate lives and for making me appreciate anew a sociology of personal life through this shared space of intimacy. To every piece of musical, literary and cinematic creation through which I am growing a sensibility and an imagination of the 'intimate' within and beyond Bengal, I extend my heartfelt gratitude. Sociology or otherwise, my family always gave me 'home' to all my unanswered questions, and meaning to all that is apparently meaningless. Even before I was formally trained into feminist schools of thought; my grandmother, Anjali and her daughter, my mother, Arpita, unwittingly sensitized me into the generational nuances of a woman's world, her 'bargain with patriarchy' and her 'situated feminism'. My research is dedicated to them and many more Anjalis and Arpitas. Unlike what most of my friends think, these four years of rigorous research on heterosexual intimacy, romance and coupling have possibly made me less romantic and more sceptical like most feminist sociologists. For living and sharing with me my scepticisms and for loving me precisely because of my contradictions; I cannot thank enough Rajarshi, my best 'friend'. His gender sensititized perceptions that are emerging not from any direct feminist training but in his narrative, from his love for a woman and her love for sociology, gives me an inspiring glimpse of the other side of oppressive heterosexual love in mundane experiences of heterosexuality. Ultimately, this research is dedicated to an intimate teacher-life: its intimate pains and paradoxes.

2012

The idea that any of us knows what we will do with the rest of our lives, let alone "forever," barely noses out its opposite-that we have absolutely no idea what we will do with them-for top honors in ego inflation. We cannot guarantee that a moment a year from now, or even tomorrow, rests within our complete, predictive comprehension; but neither can we honestly cast ourselves as becomings of pure and resistant improvisation who render each future moment (now, and now, and now, and . . .) in full immunity to the materialities, politics, habits, and normativities of our time. Nonetheless, those of us interested in same-sex relationships (a category that dissolves under the least scrutiny) as a component of our erotic/affectionate/ identificatory lives sometimes make oaths of commitment until our deaths; and we sometimes criticize those who make such commitments (sometimes ourselves, as it turns out) as "assimilationist," colluding with the dominant sociality and therefore insufficiently queer. But most of us do so without, say, giving up our cars, jobs, bank accounts, degrees, languages, shoes, and/or myriad other accessions to the social symbolic. The success of such critiques of assimilation, despite their being conducted by those assimilating in myriad other ways demonstrates that, however antisocial queerness may be, it is hardly incompatible with more or less traditional forms of academic sociality (debate, publication, tenure, etc.). For all the sexism, racism, and occasionally overt homophobia we still face in the academy, there do exist spaces . . . where leading an explicitly queer intellectual life in print as a mode of professional advancement names an institutionally viable and socially intelligible path across the profession. (Weiner and Young 230) As a result, whether swearing the marriage oath or critiquing it, we perform both a vow and an assimilation. The oath of marriage (at least traditionally) vows what it cannot foresee (inflating its epistemic authority as temporally unbounded-applicable to all time). The critique of marriage as assimilationist vows that it knows better (inflating its own institutionally intelligible epistemic authority as spatially unboundedapplicable to all cases). Likewise, the oath of marriage assimilates into a discursive possibility and legal structure previously dominated by heterosexuality-itself a

Indian Journal of Health, Sexuality and Culture, 2019

The Struggle is not over! Beyond 'Situating the Invisibles'-Acceptance is the Key As we immerse ourselves in materially rich and lofty aspirations in mid-2019,what I would attribute to a superfine summer in London and while we envision 2020, our engagements in Queer Lives have certainly got quite th diverse. We are engaged with the50 -year Celebration of Stonewall raids, th and 50 -year Celebration of decriminalisation in the United Kingdom. In the past two months, we witnessed a range of activities and significant corporate interest and displayed commitment. It was indeed unprecedented, and certainly gives us a lot of hope in the dark times we continue to live, although our lives are floundered with the economic slowdown, policy paralysis, and a complete breakdown of a moral fabric which was known to have dominated our social lives over past 50 years! As we witness 50 years of PRIDE being published, publicised and glorified, it offers us opportunities to take a pause, look back, and see where did we start, and how far have we come with our effort at creating societies which value co-existence, amity and true cosmopolitan principles of equality in true sense of the term.

Palgrave 'Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences' Series, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 282

Journal of Women Empowerment and Studies, 2023

This paper concerns how, from a dilemmatic character at the beginning of the novel to a fully developed character, Madhu in Anosh Irani’s The Parcel becomes free by accepting herself as she is. The Parcel is a story about the protagonist, Madhu, who has spent most of her life as a transgender sex worker in the notorious red-light district of Bombay, Kamathipura. Madhu, throughout her life, can’t understand her body and soul and chooses to remain in her mind’s closet. As a boy in childhood, Madhu knew that his soul was fitted into the wrong body. So, she tried to fit into the hijra community for acceptance, but Madhu rejected the soul’s desires. Since Madhu’s childhood, Madhu had faced much ostracization from family, friends, and the whole society and chose to remain unhappy by accepting those condemnations. Accepting your own body and listening to your soul is more important for coming out of the closet to the queer community than the acceptance of a dominant patriarchal society. Ma...