preface (2011)

preface In fall 2000, Feminist Studies published a special issue on gender studies in India and the South Asian diaspora, reviewing the trajectory of women's movements and identity formations and offering potent writing on citi zenship, community, and nationalism. Over ten years later, this special issue presents important advances in feminist scholarship on the region. In a decade that has witnessed the official decriminalization of homosexu ality, a vibrant sex workers' movement, female politicians holding the reins of state and national governments, expanding markets, and horrific violence against religious minorities, feminists have both refined and recast the scope of their analyses. Some of the most important contribu tions are found in scholarship on sexuality and intimate relationships, offering alternatives to standardized binary formulations of sexual desire and subjectivity. Whereas the forms and ramifications of marriage—its minimum age, its property, and status implications—have long been objects of critique in Indian feminism, recent scholarship moves the debate forward by de-centering the heterosexual couple, tracing desires and identities that flourish beyond hegemonic dictates. This special issue covers archival, ethnographic, filmic, and case law sources that underline the instability of the heterosexual couple. It presents a range of conjugali ties by documenting various arrangements of procreation and household economies: from devadasi women gifted to goddesses, to lesbians who wed, to rapists who marry their victims as a means to atone for their violence. It offers scholarly and creative reflections on the place of sexuality in the formulation of gender categories, the nuclear couple, and caste differ ences. Drawing on the rich historical and anthropological record in India, the essays and artistic works in this issue provide an engaging set of refer ence points and a new politics of visibility on questions of intimacy, conju gality, and sexuality. Feminist Studies37, no. 1 (Spring 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 7 Preface In our first essay, titled "Abundance and Loss: Queer Intimacies in South Asia," Naisargi Dave provides a clear sense of the shifting terrain of sexuality studies in South Asia. Reviewing a set of recently published books that demonstrate and examine the inventive fecundity of queer life," Dave argues that what these books contribute is not merely their documentation of these extraordinary moments of queer presence but also their "tentative embrace of loss that lies at the heart of liberatory poli tics, if not of (queer) love itself." Through this embrace, this active—and Dave argues, enabling—grappling with loss, the four books chosen, namely, Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, Maya Sharma's Loving Women: Being Lesbian and Unprivileged in India, Ruth Vanita's Love's Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, and Gayatri Reddy's With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India, illuminate these very tensions, between presence and absence, between "the will to know and a willingness to acknowledge some things as unknowable." Tracking a range of entitlements—the entitlement to seek (Arondekar); to speak (Vanita); to be respected, to care and be cared for (Reddy); and to love (Sharma)—these four books occupy, even "constitute," the space of inti macy, a space that is "driven by a tension between presence and absence, one made manifest in the desire to both have the other and to love the other from a distance that enables human flourishing." And it is precisely this intimate space, and these productive tensions, that the books—and Dave's essay—capture so well. Lucinda Ramberg, in "When the Devi Is Your Husband: Sacred Marriage and Sexual Economy in South India," presents an ambitious agenda for recasting marriage and sexual exchange. Instead of focusing on objectification and agency, their most common conceptual girders, Ramberg focuses on how value is produced through marriage. Reflecting on her ethnographic work among devotees of the goddess Yellamma in southern India, as well as classic texts in feminist political economy, she argues that marriage is a technology for producing particular kinds of persons and value. Rather than placing married women and devadasis in opposition, as many conventional accounts do, she locates them within a single system. In noting that both daughters and devadasis are gifted by...