Sexuality

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Feminist Keywords, the podcast companion to our 2021 book, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, published with New York University Press. You don't need to have the book to listen, but if you wanna buy it, or if it was assigned for a class, it's available at all major online booksellers, including NYU Press at keywords.nyupress.org, which is also gonna be listed in today's show notes. We created keywords for gender and sexuality studies as a readable resource to bring important concepts and debates and feminist square and trans theory and politics to your kitchen table, classroom, discussion group, book club, or anywhere you wanna engage in these conversations. We asked 77 leading thinkers to write on 70 terms, ranging from hashtag to intersectionality, reproduction to woman. In Feminist Keywords, we expand on the book by interviewing our authors, so you can hear them in their own voices, talk about the significance of their key word. We hope that these interviews generate conversations, debates, and additional questions about the urgent issues that face you in your community. (upbeat music) I'm your host for today. My name is karma javas. I'm the Bobby and Sherry Pat Professor in Mexican American and Latino Latino Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the recent book, The Borders of AIDS, Raised Quarantine and Resistance. And I am a member of the Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, which also includes Kilo Asana Topkins, R&A Zura, Amy Bong, Moshana Goman, and Amber Jemilla Muster. For this episode, I'm super excited about my guess, Dhruba Mitra, Richard B. Wolf Associate Professor of Women Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, and author of Indian Sex Life, Sexuality in the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2020. And Dr. Mitra is the author of our sexuality entry, and welcome to Feminist Keywords. - Thank you so much for having me, karma. I'm so excited to be here. - I'm excited to have this conversation with you because I assured, I guess, our shepherding, we called it shepherding. You with your keyword from the beginning, and so it's a pleasure to get to know you through that process. And so I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about who you are, and what your pronouns are, who tells that, and what you're really kind of passionate about right now. - Thank you. So I take she her pronouns, I'll take they, and what I'm passionate about, well, it feels like there's not enough time in the world right now to be, to express how much passion I have about a range of feminist and queer issues that we advocate for. I am a scholar, an interdisciplinary scholar of gender and sexuality. I work on the Global South, particularly, I work on South Asia and the African continent. And in my work, I look at how ideas of sexuality have shaped how we think and write about modern society. And I look at that through the development of modern disciplines and ideas about how we write knowledge. I look at that in terms of how women do research, women and queer and LGBT communities more broadly, do research about themselves in a later part of the 20th century. And more recently, I've started to look at things that I've been really passionate about, which is thinking about how we live in this world and survive in the world together. So most recently I've been doing research around how we think about the concept of mutual aid. So that gives you a sense of the fact that I'm passionate about the past, the present, and hopefully how we imagine the future. - So thinking about mutual aid, how does that connect with your previous work that's been about sexuality? And what's the through line there? - For me, it's really about the fact that I think people who are sexual minorities and women experience the most vulnerability. That really, that is a can get through line in general in my work. In my first book, I look at the vulnerability of people who are sexually excluded, particularly people who are labeled as sexually deviant, or seen as outside of the norm of heterosexuality in a colonial space of colonial India. In my second book, I am writing about how women and sexual minorities come to do research about themselves in the 1970s and 80s and start to organize around research networks and try to create information for themselves to figure out how to survive. And whether it's data about how many people are experiencing sexual or gendered violence, what it means to get access to food, what it means to do the work of gendered labor. So they start to write about themselves. And then in this project of around mutual aid, I'm really thinking about how do we create knowledge for ourselves as communities to figure out survival in the face of environmental degradation, pandemic crises, political crises. Because I think that those are the challenges that face sexual minorities, women, vulnerable communities. Yeah, and of course, in this historical moment, so you and I are talking in November of 2023, where on I believe day, I don't know, 47 at this point, of the ongoing bombardment, I guess the ceasefire for a few days of Gaza is going to happen, maybe tomorrow they're saying. And so the urgency of your work is not mirroring an intellectual question. It's a vibrant, urgent political question. And how do you understand the relationship between scholarship and politics? I think people who have the right to write themselves, and by that, I mean, the human right to write themselves, are the ones who have the ability to humanize and create different imaginations of what it needs to live. And so when we think about the contemporary moment, but we also think about something like climate crisis, the great majority of people who experience crisis in our world don't have a voice in how we understand the world. There's overrepresentation of particular people, particularly from the first world, and not enough representation of the different lives, the different experiences, the different humanities that we live with in most of the world. And so how do I think about the relationship between scholarship and survival or the relationship between scholarship and activism? I think that scholarship is a necessary part of ensuring that people have access to information and knowing what it means to live in the world. And so one of the things that we see in this time of war, whether we're talking about Sudan or the Congo or what's happening, the contemporary crisis that's going on in Gaza, is, of course, much of what we are faced with is the question of who we have access to information, who's giving us the information that we have. I think of scholarship as an ethical commitment to knowledge and information that centers justice at its heart, particularly feminist scholarship. And so I see that's the work of feminist scholarship is to write just visions of knowledge in order to make sure people have access to write themselves. I love that definition. And that was actually going to be my next question, is like, how do you understand feminism in relation to your work? Where do you do your feminism and that kind of thing? I love this question. I think it's a hard question, because where don't I do at my feminism is how I think about it. One of the great parts for me of being part of feminist keywords was really getting to interrogate a term that I use all of the time in my daily life, in my teaching, in my scholarship, and really digging in deep and thinking about what it means intellectually, what it means historically, but also what it means for us again in terms of the future. So how do I live my feminist life? I think living a feminist life to you Sarah Ahmed's phrase is to live fully and completely in my feminism. And that means as a teacher, that makes me think about, how do I run my classroom ethically? What does it mean to include different voices and perspectives in the way I teach? As a scholar, it is, as I said, centering justice in the project of knowledge and knowledge making. And in terms of my daily life, it comes through a lot of the work that I've done related to thinking about domestic violence among my noratized communities and sexual violence. A lot of the advocacy I work I've done has been around, how do we think together about histories of injustice in cases of sexual violence in the colonial and post-colonial world, but also here in the United States, but also more broadly in my daily life, I am a South Asian American. The diasporque community is among Asian Americans can often be very patriarchal. So sometimes the advocacy is as small as helping students understand that they have the right to experience their sexuality as they choose whether or not their community always accepts them. Sometimes it means talking to my mother or a different generation of people about who gets to eat first at a community gathering. So my feminism lives in different places, but in some ways, I don't think I live without my feminism. What a cool answer. Thank you for that. So you had the sort of unique challenge that I don't think anyone else really had, which is that your key word is in the title of the book. Will you talk a little bit about how you took this word, sexuality, that's so huge. And I think we gave you 3,000 words to digest its significance for gender and sexuality studies. What was your approach? So I agree it was a challenge. And I think it took a lot of meditating on my part to think about how I would write about this term that I call ubiquitous in the description. But ubiquitous, I mean, it's everywhere, everything, all at once. It's everything we imagine ourselves to be in terms of identity, but we also use it to describe visual imaginations. We use it to describe how people act and behave, comport themselves. And so it's a strange word because it gets to be everything we need it to be. One of the things that I decided to do was really just look up the word. And the first thing I realized is that this word that I imagined as a timeless, constantly present term, this idea, was in fact way more recent than I had initially imagined. And what I realized very quickly, and part of this has to do with my training as a person who looks at colonialism as a critical way in which we organize modern knowledge systems is that actually sexuality is pretty recent, and it's centered and really emerges in the colonial world and as a result of histories of racism, coloniality, and enslavement. So if someone maybe hasn't read the entry yet, which by the way, it's so beautifully written. And they just heard what you said about how sexuality is constituted by these things that they might think of as separate, or they may not understand that direct relationship. If you had to summarize what that means, what would you say? - So sexuality is a term really only emerges about 240, 240 years ago, which is pretty recent in the scheme of a English language. And it's a term that emerges as a result of botany, the science of botany, the science of the natural, like of the natural world, specifically related to plants. And it's a term first used around with Linnaeus, who's an important scientist who helps classify plants, whose system of classification is then used often to describe people from the colonized world, or people who are not white, from all of the other races, essentially. And so one of the things you find is that the race sciences in the 19th century are related to this history of botany. And so sexuality is a term that's initially used to describe the relationship between plants. But it's very quickly picked up by people like colonial officials, people who are in charge of plantations in the history of enslavement, to classify and describe the colonized or enslaved people who are under their power. And so very quickly sexuality is tied to practices of description and classification that are basin systems of power that emerge in the late 18th and early 19th century. So when I say that it's a colonial term, I mean it as a term that as soon as it's invented, it's wielded to help powerful people be powerful. And it helps them be powerful in all kinds of ways. And one of the ways that I describe in the entry is by first classifying women in spaces of colonial India as sexually deviant, as sexually available, as more promiscuous than women in Europe, for example. Another example that I give in the entry is the example of a woman who is later called Sara Bartman, who is a South African woman who's taken to Europe, first to the UK and then France, and placed on display in systems of human display that were very common in the 18th and 19th centuries. And one of the critical parts of the history of Sara Bartman or Sarjay Bartman as a history of racism and racial classification is that Sara Bartman was herself examined by a naturalist in France after her passing, not of course of her consent. And so the system of natural classification, that is to say the natural sciences was used to try to understand her body and sexuality was critical, the term sexuality was critical to these histories of racial difference, of racial migration and forced migration, and the history of description that becomes part of the race sciences. - Wow, you just covered so much and it was so clear and so helpful. I'm really appreciative of that. A question I have then is thinking about what we want to do with this podcast and making it accessible for a wide range of audiences. How do you see those similar logics manifesting in the contemporary moment? - By the 20th century, we think of sexuality as more of an identity category. And the scholar who helps us think about that the most when we learn about sexuality in a classroom is Michelle Foucault, who tells us about sexuality that it's, again, not a natural thing. It's not something that just held within a sexual identity, but that it's socially constructed. It's imposed upon us and it's critical to systems of power. And so how do we think about it in a contemporary way? In some way, sexuality is infused into everything that we do. One of the examples that I feel like I didn't get enough opportunity to talk about in the keyword description is the category of LGBT, right? This idea of the acronym. And the fact that we keep adding terms to the acronym. So the fact that sexual identity then becomes something that can be acronymized, if that's a word, I don't think it is, but turned into a set of letters and that you can describe a whole diverse range of experiences, people's behaviors through a set of letters. That, to me, is the way I think about sexuality and the way that modern governance works today. That sometimes the only way to make claims on the state or on systems of power is to submit to systems of power and its classification and classificatory regime. So the story that I tell about the 18th century, that there was the system of classification in a bunch of textbooks about botany. Now we can see that classification has proliferated. That classification lives all over the world in all kinds of texts, not only textbooks, but also in the way that we engage with one another. Sometimes we call ourselves the acronym that was once given to us by a system of power. So I might call myself an LGBT individual or part of the LGBT community. So we take an acronym and we make it our own. And that's part of the life of sexuality, just to finish up, is some ways sexuality is also about the fact that there are systems of classification, but we have to live in these systems. And sometimes we take these classifications, we reinvent them, we re-imagine them, and by virtue of living in them, we get to invent them a new. - I mean, I think sexuality has become a site of resistance in terms of identification too. And I'll hear this sometimes with some of my Gen Z students, if we're talking about sexual identity categories, and there's an allergy to identifying with those categories. And part of the justification has to do with this recognition by the state or other institutions. And I guess I'm wondering from your vantage point, it is one of those more politically pure kind of position, or what's your take on that kind of resistance to those identity categories. - And one thing that I love about working with students is the fact that they take what I've naturalized, having grown up in a particular setting with particular norms, and they tell me that my norms shouldn't apply to them. That's one of the great joys of teaching, is realizing in the 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, since a certain text has been written, how much has changed, how quickly we are willing and able to change our sexual imaginations and identity categories, or not identify at all, refuse those categories. So I would say two things. The first is sometimes I have students who will say, "Well, I refuse those identity categories," or I refuse that gender identity. And I appreciate and understand the student's perspectives, but I think scholarship and the history of colonialism and racism and histories of slavery tell us that for as long as we think about the question of refusal, we must also think about the systems of oppression and also systems of enforcement that limit how much one can refuse categories, and at least shape how we navigate that practice of refusal. And so the example I would give because I'm a scholar who works on the global South or in South Asia, for example, is thinking about people who need basic access to resources, food, stuff, for example. And an NGO that works for a queer community only allows you to access something like basic food stuff or public health or access to testing for AIDS, if you elect into a category by calling yourself gay or a lesbian or HIV positive or MSM, like men supposedly MSM, men having sex with men, as a designated category that becomes very popular in the 90s as a result of AIDS research, which you know very well, karma. And so people have to self-elect into the classification in order to gain access to material resources. At the same time, they refuse the category. So we can think about this in terms of, for example, transcommunities or the category of trans. Very recently, there has been much mobilization around the category of trans, particularly related to legislation for transcommunities, both in Pakistan and in India. And these communities have both elected into the category and said that the category is insufficient to describe the experience of gender identity in South Asia where a community that would historically have been called the Hidra community says we're not quite the trans of the first world. We're not quite the identity category that we, that one might imagine about the first world of trans people. We see this, for example, among travesti communities in Latin America, right? That the travesti should not just be equated with the category of trans. But at the same time, there are NGOs, for example, international funding that is given to trans communities or trans NGOs in the context of South Asia. And if you want to elect into getting access to those resources, public health again, access to basic employment guidance, basic access to food. Sometimes you have to elect into the category. So people both refuse and participate in it. And I think the project of refusal is about creating new definitions. But it also speaks to the flexibility of categories that are supposed to be quite narrow, like trans that, in fact, become animated with all kinds of identity formations that extend far beyond what they maybe were originally imagined as. Yeah, that's super helpful. And I guess it relates to, this is the last major question that I have for you today, which is, how does the word or the term the keyword sexuality? How does it get misused? Or how do you see it used in ways that don't resonate with the way you understand it? I don't know if we can say a term is misused. That's what I would say to that, which is the misuse of a term makes it something else. And that's, I think, the history of concepts like sexuality. When I write the history of sexuality, I think of it not really as a sexual identity. But today, we talk about sexuality, and we think about it like, what's your sexuality? And people often respond by saying my sexual identity is X. And so we think of it as an identity category. But one of the critical parts that I learned in writing this keyword entry is that sexuality should also be thought about as an enforcement of sexual difference, for example. Sexuality is the difference between something that's biologically male and biologically female. And that root comes from the history of sexuality as a term that comes from botany. And so I think of the fact that sexuality continues to be a flexible idea. And that flexibility allows people to invent and reinvent it. And so I can't name a way it's misused. I can name many ways that it's abused or the ways that experiences of exclusion, state violence, marginalization are enforced by and through sexuality. And I think the most recent example, or the best example that I could give in the context in which we are speaking, is the way it is used to justify war and violence. And so an example of that would be the way that histories or rumors of sexual violence against women tied to racialized identities like being Muslim are used to justify war or ideas of the oppression of sexual minority communities, of LGBT communities are used to justify the oppression of occupied places and people. And so I think the project of feminism is at its heart fundamentally anti-violence, not non-violent but anti-violence. And I often see the use of the term sexuality to justify systems of state violence. That is a one misuse that I disagree with you. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. I think that's such a really important answer to that question. And a great way to end our show for today. So thank you so much for being here with me today. Absolutely, thank you. So once again, I would like to thank my guest, Dr. Rubin Mitchell, Richard B. Wolf, Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality and Harvard University, author of the Sexuality Entry. I'd also like to thank Professor Karen Tongsten at the University of Southern California for spearheading this podcast series. Our audio engineer, Alison Holly, for producing the podcast. This podcast is supported by the consortium for gender sexuality race and public culture. A melon-funded intersectional studies collective at the University of Southern California, which brings together researchers working on gender, race, and sexuality and popular culture, while also translating that research to the public square. It's also funded and supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Buffalo. Thanks so much for listening to Feminist Key Words, the audio companion to key words for gender and sexuality studies.