Masculinity, Sexuality, and Culture in India
The project 'Masculinity, Sexuality and Culture in India: Systems of knowledge, sites of practice' seeks to address the almost total lack of 'ethnographic' scholarly research on issues of masculinity and sexuality in India in order to position these in the context of the AIDS pandemic in the Subcontinent. Research on masculinity and sexuality in the Indian context must assume a new urgency in view of the reported trends in the pandemic in the Subcontinent.
By SANJAY SRIVASTAVA
Bryan Turner (1995) notes that a 'disease is... a system of signs which can be read and translated in a variety of ways' (p. 200), and that the medicalization of aetiological knowledge may obscure the complex nature of the human situation and the possibility of a more effective aetiology which might result from a taking account of the non-medical context of diseases. A commitment towards a socio-cultural (ie. specific) analysis of sexual contexts within which the spread of AIDS is embedded should then lead us towards the study of such cultural forms as masculinity and conceptions of the body which underline sexuality and its practice. This has been recognized by medical specialists in the field of AIDS research.Apart from this, we need to abandon conceptions of gender and the body as 'regulated' topics, conceptualizing these 'in a more fluid manner to allow for... important social changes in the wider social context' (Turner 1995:21). Hence, this research will also analyse changes in the 'wider social context' of Indian society which influence contemporary Indian subjectivity. This social context includes: the relationship between 'modernity' and 'tradition', attitudes towards an emerging commodity culture, engagements with the popular cultures of the mass media, the role of certain contemporary sites of therapy (advice columns in magazines, 'sex-clinics', counselling services, etc.), the varied discourses of sexual health, and the socio-cultural effects of globalization on issues of sexuality. An ethnographic focus on these issues in order to generate a culturally sensitive and theoretically aware understanding of South Asian sexualities constitutes the specific objective of this project.
The present project also seeks to make a contribution in the area of methodology through a proposed collaboration with a Delhi-based Non Government Organization working in the area of sex education and sexuality issues in general. This aspect is guided by the belief that academics must find ways of engaging with debates in non-academic contexts in order to generate a critical social science which both contributes to the societies it works in, and which is unafraid to allow itself to be problematized by the demands of politics on the ground. In an important sense, then, this project is an attempt to develop a framework of social science research that is simultaneously non-instrumental and politically engaged.
The work of Michel Foucault has been particularly influential in orientating recent research on the production of modern subjectivity through medical, penal and other discourses, and on sexuality research in general. However, as I have recently argued elsewhere (Srivastava 1998), it is not clear that Foucault's insights, linked as they are exclusively to European history and society, can be substantially applied to non-European, post-colonized contexts. Hence, the present project aims to develop anthropological models for understanding non-European subjectivity (sexual and otherwise) which, whilst not making a fetish of 'difference', do not also completely ignore the specificities of local histories and cultural milieux. This project will also situate notions of Indian masculinity/sexuality within the contexts of uncertainty and differentiation that writers such as Bryan Turner and Ulrich Beck (1992) describe. In general, these too have not been much analysed in the anthropology of South Asia. Here, the project attempts to bridge the gap between exclusively historical and textual analyses of the socio-cultural context of Indian sexuality, and ethnographic work that engages with contemporary issues of modernity and subjectivity.
'Sex clinics'
An important aspect of the present research consists in the attempt to utilize 'sex clinics' as sites of communication, knowledge, and treatment which belong to the non-formal sector of the political and cultural economy of the post-colonized state. The clinics, in their present form, are mainly an urban phenomenon and offer a variety of services to their clients: 'cures' for sexually transmitted diseases, impotence, and premature ejaculation, ways of enhancing sexual 'performance', begetting male progeny etc. Clinic operators deploy medical and scientific terminology in conjunction with 'traditional' notions of masculinity, sexuality, and sexual well-being to attract their clientele. The clinics are one of the several sites of the articulation of masculinity, gender relations, class, the national and commodity cultures of modernity, the tension of urban life for the poor, and discourses on communicable diseases. They are also places for information on contemporary notion of intimacy, domesticity, and conjugality, and on the attempts to engage with modernity through attempting to become a part of the sexual economy of modernity. Finally, and not least, they are an untapped source of information for anyone who seeks to understand the cultural context of AIDS in the Subcontinent. Sex clinics are usually located in or near three kinds of places: near major transport nodes such as railway stations and inter-state bus depots; in newly established outlying 'colonies' of the metropolis which may contain a mixture of slum dwellings, light industrial units (such as dyeing businesses), and new and old pucca housing; and in older and established commercial localities, such as Chandini Chowk in central Delhi, an area that is also home to an industrial and semi-industrial labour force from provincial areas. There is quite clearly work to be done on the geography of sexuality, in its literal spatialized sense.
The plan of research involves sustained periods of fieldwork across a number of sites, with aspects of the research work being shared between Sanjay Srivastava and Patricia Uberoi (Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University) plus a research associate, S. Veenapani, from Mumbai. The cities of Delhi and Mumbai are the primary sites of fieldwork research in the present phase of the project. In sum, the project proposes a series of ethnographic case studies of social institutions, practitioners, and cultural contexts for sexual practices, and the production and communication of sexual knowledge, with particular reference to male sexual behaviour. Among the topics to be addressed through these studies are the following:
a. modes of knowledge: case studies in the context of the plurality of medical systems and therapeutic practices in India;
b. types of practitioners and specialists: case studies of practitioners, from qualified allopathic doctors, to self-appointed 'sexologists', to ritual practitioners of exorcism, etc.;
c. sites of practice: case studies of government and private fertility clinics, 'sex and vitality' clinics, counselling centres, etc.;
d. channels of communication: case studies of multiple means of transmission of advice and knowledge, from top-down, government-sponsored information and policy statements in the electronic and print media, genres of folk culture and modern mass media, pornography, self-instruction manuals, interactive media such as radio talk-back programmes, counselling centres;
e. diversity of practices: case studies of the range of actually existing practices of sexuality, and models of masculinity;
f. practices of the state: what are the 'official' versions of masculinity supported by the contemporary nation-state and what are avenues through which these are propagated? How does the state/legal system treat people with HIV/AIDS. What are official attitudes towards homosexuality? Case studies of official AIDS-related programmes and of the Family Planning Programme. What are the connections between the latter and ideas on masculinity and procreative behaviour? *
Dr Sanjay Srivastava was a visiting exchange fellow at the IIAS (ANU),
15 November 1999 15 February 2000.
E-mail: sanjays@deakin.edu.au