Mapping Sexuality and Political Economy in India: Methods and Means

<strong>Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (JNIAS)</strong> <strong>Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> <strong>Mapping Sexuality and Political Economy in India: Methods and Means</strong> <strong>Svati Shah</strong> University of Massachusetts, Amherst <strong>on Monday 1st February 2016</strong> <strong>Abstract : </strong>In this talk, I will review my research program on sex work and LGBTQ politics in India, with a focus on earlier ethnographic work on sex work and migration in Mumbai, and new work on LGBTQ subjectivities and Indian social and political movements. The question of what constitutes "sexuality" is at the heart of this project, and is concomitant with critiques of prevailing neo/liberal theoretical frames of gender and sexuality. The problem of bringing social categories that are legible as forms of "sexuality" raising methodological questions when we attempt to account for political economic questions in this milieu, questions that I review in relation to ethnographic and theoretical interventions that this research engages.