Sexuality in Modern India: Critical Concerns

Abstract

While sexuality and issues relating to it have come up periodically in the past, it is only now, with the growing feminist concern with the rights of women to their lives and bodies, that sexuality has gained a more enduring prominence.

Questions of sexuality have been raised during a number of critical periods in modem India and clearly predate explicit feminist concern. To the extent that sexuality has today gained a more enduring prominence as a subject of political movements or academic discourse, however, it is as a result of growing feminist involvement with the rights of women to their lives and bodies. For too long, it was not women's sexual experiences that were at stake, but the elaborate codes of honour that were/ are inscribed on female bodies. Women bear the marks, sometimes, violent marks, of caste, ethnic and national imaginations.