What is "sexuality"?

Sexuality is a central aspect of being human throughout life and encompasses sex, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy and reproduction. Sexuality is experienced and expressed in thoughts, fantasies, desires… behaviors… and relationships"(pp. 131, Misra, Gitanjali & Chandiramani, Radhika, eds., Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia, 2006).

Sexuality has been a site of intense confrontation and contestation for several centuries, and continues to draw further debates about how the power dynamics of gender roles play out on the micro and macro levels. Today, much of the “developed” West and parts of South East Asia have succeeded in creating a stridently oppositional body of knowledge and theory around the discourse on sexuality. These discussions have entered the Indian context only recently, but over the last decade there has been a burgeoning of activism and academia that is exclusive to gender roles, stereotypes and the ways in which we consume and reproduce sexuality and sexual behavior. The public discourse about sexuality today is, at its best, inscribed within the rubric of human rights, the right to knowledge, expression, desire, and choice. However, the images and stereotypes that pervade our social fabric, particularly those concerning women and sexually marginalized communities pose a formidable barrier when trying to explore and unpack what it means to be a sexual being with unique desires and beliefs about one’s body and sexuality.

The traditionally accepted model of sexual identity—heterosexuality--is itself replete with violence and oppression. The idea of how, what, and when people should desire are all based upon ideals of monogamy, a very specific version of beauty, and pregnancy and childbearing. “Desire” almost always disappears in the context of the overarching necessity of reproduction and rearing progeny, and by implication renders any other mode of desiring sex or framing sexuality and sexual identity taboo and perverse. India, like the rest of the world, has a large community of people who have chosen alternative sexualities. This means that they choose to be with partners of the same sex or decide to frame themselves outside of binary gender constructions. The transsexual community, Aravanis or Hijras are probably the best known instance, who, because of their cultural significance and physical markers, as well as being an HIV-AIDS risk group are “othered”, pathologized, and relegated to the margins of so-called “normal” society.

Other communities, especially those of gay men, are also “high risk” and it is mostly within the context of sexual health (as opposed to desire, pleasure, or political identity) that these groups have even been identified by public society. Therefore, the issue of women in same-sex relationships or with same-sex desires does not possess the legitimacy of being identified even in terms of public health, as the absence of penetrative sex makes the risk of HIV AIDS as well as other sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) comparatively lower. As a result, lesbian women are made invisible even beyond the realm of taboo and pathology, doubly challenged by virtue of being women and possessing sexual desires outside the framework of the ever-present heteronormative structure.

Sexuality, as Gitanjali Misra and Radhika Chandiramani point out in Sexuality, Gender and Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia, is no longer (if it ever was), “a private matter,” but is linked “to public privileges and persecutions, is clearly intersected by gender, law, religion and nationality, and directly affects heath and human rights” (pp. 147). These issues of choice, freedom, and expression are produced and reproduced in every generation, both at the individual as well as the socio-structural level.

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