Showing 1 - 2 of 2 Items

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Rahul Prabhu

Access: Open access

Sexuality was at the fulcrum of various issues facing late-colonial India from social reform projects such as child marriage, women’s rights and birth control to concerns of socioeconomic, physical and sexual weakening. The question of sexual modernity became implicated in imaginations of the modern post-colonial nation, setting the stage for a period of energized, linguistically plural projects of sexual knowledge production. While science was used to authorize such projects in the West, where could authority be located in a context where science held plural meaning and authority itself was highly contested? This paper asks how scientific authority was understood, deployed and shaped by the eugenics project of Narayan Sitaram Phadke (1894-1978) and the sexology project of A.P. Pillay (1890-1956). This thesis argues that the mechanics of each figures’ utilization of science captures how the interaction between scientific authority and society was understood by Phadke and Pillay in different ways. While both figures subscribed to the idea that science was universally authoritative in the making of sexual modernity, Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects show the plurality in how science was understood by social reformers. Furthermore, the thesis presents the differences between Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects as a product of the larger movements – British-era birth control advocacy, Hindu nationalism, upper-caste marriage reform and global sexology – that Phadke and Pillay were distinctly invested in or separated from. Scientific authority and the mechanics of its use is proposed as a vivid lens into the complex dynamics of modernization in late-colonial India.

Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Gillian Raley

Access: Open access

This paper analyzes the methods of resistance enacted by women-identifying people in Mississippi against the institutions seeking to police how they understand their own sexuality and bodily autonomy. This analysis draws upon a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in the summer of 2020 focused on construction of community, intersectional identity, relationship with the body, and what inputs frame how women in Mississippi understand sex. This project puts these interviews in conversation with literature from a variety of subfields, including resistance studies, the Sociology of the South, and the Sociology of sexuality, all of which help bring the argument behind these data to light. Resistance looks different in different eras, and generally scholars like to analyze resistance as collective action, collective voice, collective struggle. These data instead argue that strategic, individualized resistance is just as vital to marginalized bodies, particularly when explosive action is not possible. Studying strategies of resistance that lurk beneath the surface not only expands what we now see as “radical,” but it also lends insight into where lasting change can begin.