Synopses & Reviews
Made In India explores the making of "queer" and "heterosexual" consciousness and identities in light of economic privatization, global condom enterprises, sexuality-focused NGOs, the Bollywood-ization of beauty contests, and trans/national activism. In examining seemingly disparate and high profile events in post/neo colonial India, since the 1990s
, Made In India demonstrates the relationships between identity formation and the political economy of trans/national sexualities. These events demonstrate the material, political, and cultural contexts within which postcolonial subjects negotiate their lived experiences within moments of decolonization and recolonization. Bhaskaran's unique analysis makes
Made in India an important addition to postcolonial studies, gender studies, and diaspora studies courses.
Review
Made in India is a provocative and important contribution to queer diaspora and area studies. Working from the ever-globalizing present, Suparna Bhaskaran shows how
Made in India is at once the result of commodity production in the liberal(ized) economy and of Indian nationalism's increasingly phantasmatic attempts to reinforce its sexual, racial and class boundaries in the postcolonial world."--Kamala Visweswaran, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin
"Compellingly Innovative. Highly readable. Suparna Bhaskaran has gifted a most skillfully imagined ethnography. She has taken the word queer through a transnational journey that is at once intimate and political, and, in so doing, she has fashioned a new and expansive vocabulary about the formation of sexual subjectivities in neocolonial India. This is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the radical transformation of what it means to be queer."--M. Jacqui Alexander, author of forthcoming Pedagogies of Crossing
Synopsis
Made in India examines seemingly disparate and high profile events in postcolonial India that captured national and transnational/diasporic interest since the 1990s: The emergence of the Indian homosexual, the new trans/national heterosexual woman, lesbian suicides, marriage and kinship contracts in small towns around India and the simultaneous evolution of the modern homophobia and lesbian NGOs. These events demonstrate the material, political, and cultural contexts within which postcolonial subjects negotiate their lived experiences within moments of decolonization and recolonization.
Synopsis
Made In India explores the making of queer and heterosexual consciousness and identities in light of economic privatization, global condom enterprises, sexuality-focused NGOs, the Bollywood-ization of beauty contests, and trans/national activism. In examining seemingly disparate and high profile events in post/neo colonial India, since the 1990s, Made In India demonstrates the relationships between identity formation and the political economy of trans/national sexualities. These events demonstrate the material, political, and cultural contexts within which postcolonial subjects negotiate their lived experiences within moments of decolonization and recolonization. Bhaskaran's unique analysis makes Made in India an important addition to postcolonial studies, gender studies, and diaspora studies courses.
About the Author
Suparna Bhaskaran is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Table of Contents
Introduction * Boomerang Anthropology and Curdled Otherness * Compulsory Individuality & the Transnational Family of Nations: The Girl-Child, Bollywood Barbie & Ms. Wordly Universe * Taxonomic Desires, The Sutram of Kama, and the World Bank: "Sexual Minorities" and Section 377 of The Indian Penal Code * Inverting Economic Man: Pleasure, Violence and "Lesbian Pacts" in Postcolonial India * Bibliography