Theorizing the State and Sexuality

The last few decades have seen struggles for rights for sexual and gender minorities, like hijras, kothis, aravanis, kinnars, trans, queer peoples, and others, come to the forefront in India. The fight against antisodomy laws, in particular the Indian Penal Code Section 377, a colonial law first introduced in 1860 by the British Raj, has become the focus of struggles to decriminalize homosexuality in India. Jyoti Puri's Sexual States explores these struggles and the relation between sexuality and the state. The book conceptualizes "sexual states" by studying the workings of Section 377 across different sites, analyzing both state and non-state actors. To theorize sexual states, Puri builds on the works on sexuality and state by Urvashi Butalia (2000), Veena Das (2007), Mary John and Janaki Nair (1998), Ann Laura Stoler (2004), and others. The book questions the hypervisibility of 377 as the "homophobic law" to make visible with the other methods through which the state regulation of sexuality affects marginalized communities in India. In this review, I focus on two important interventions that Puri puts forward in the book. I conclude with some critical mediations for scholars of sexuality, the state, and justice.

First, Puri masterfully captures the "inconsistencies in discourses and practices of governance" (4) in the Indian state's relation to sexual rights and justice for sexual and gender minorities. States, she asserts, are subjective and are "neither autochthonous entities nor mere material realities" (5). Puri contends that the Indian state's response to calls for sexual justice seems inconsistent, contradictory, and arbitrary because "states are fragmented and deeply subjective" (5) in how they operate. She offers a compelling argument that sexual states legitimize themselves through regulating various aspects of sexuality. Further, by juxtaposing the contentious and conflicting judgments on Section 377, namely, the "progressive" Delhi High Court 2009 judgment (striking down 377 as unconstitutional) and the "regressive" Supreme Court 2013 judgment (reaffirming the importance of 377), Puri contends that both judgments need to be studied through neoliberal state processes (chapters 5–6). The Delhi High Court judgment, while favorable toward sexual minorities, posits the state as the beacon of justice, reifying it as the ultimate arbiter of rights. Thus, even as the state may support sexual rights, this regulation works to reaffirm state structures and violences by asserting benevolence to some of those harmed by the state. Overall, the book extends the idea that states produce sexuality and that state and sexuality are deeply intertwined and continuously shaped through each other.

Second, consistently challenging the centricity of Section 377 in the fight for decriminalization of homosexuality, chapters 2–4 broaden the conversation to engage with intersections between sexual violence and violences against women, children, hijras, Muslims, and Sikhs. These were the book's most engaging sections. In a thoughtful discussion of these marginalized communities, Puri illustrates how the focus on homosexuality effaces the lived experiences and violences faced by other communities. In particular, Puri challenges the reading of 377 as the "homophobic law" to document how the section has been predominantly used for child abuse cases. Further, through her engagements with the Delhi police on 377 and works of Ania Loomba (2009), Puri offers a language of racialization to critique the hegemonic framework of religious communalism. She reveals the intersections of homophobia and religious violence by arguing that Muslims, and to a lesser extent Sikhs, are racialized as the sexual other and sexualized as the racial other. Through an ethnography of different sites of the state—the judiciary, the police, the bureaucracy, and statistical agencies—the book demonstrates how Section 377 is one of the many ways in which sexuality is regulated in India, not just through the targeting of gender and sexual minorities alone, but also religious and racial others. Indeed, homophobia exists in multiple and varied forms, of which law is only one. Puri critically exposes the limits of the legal struggles and pushes readers to imagine sexual justice through the various complexities and intricacies of sexuality in India, and...