80 – South Asian Sexualities in a Global Context: Transgressing Gender, Race, Caste and Class
This panel investigates the impact of the intensified global mobility of South Asians in the early twentieth century on the construction and assertion of South Asian sexualities. We ask how the experience of living in- and outside the British Empire shaped South Asian sexualities and how sexual norms in South Asia or in host countries were challenged by these new constellations. The first cluster of case studies focuses on the sexual and romantic lives of internationally traveling South Asians, seeking to understand the extent to which they transgressed norms of gender, race, caste, and class. As South Asians stayed abroad more and longer beginning in the early twentieth century, they engaged in intimate relationships that were at odds with the efforts of both British colonizers and Indian nationalists to contain intimacy along national, cultural and racial axes. Such relationships constituted productive challenges to racist, nationalist and xenophobic social structures in Europe and North America. On the other hand, we want to discuss to what extent “transgressive” relationships could also be repressive in nature by reproducing or introducing inequalities that manifested in sexual or gendered violence, normalization of high caste norms, heteronormativity and homophobia, amongst others. For a second thematic cluster, we welcome papers that either deal with the ensuing backlash in host societies that were openly hostile towards interracial or otherwise transgressive unions involving South Asian emigrants; or that study how transgressions impacted notions of normative sexual behavior and gender expression within South Asian (diasporic) communities. In both cases, we seek to better understand how South Asian mobility in the early twentieth century stimulated debates about and expressions of South Asian sexuality that so far have remained invisible in scholarship.