Populist Panics: Sex as Excess in Right Wing India

This Social Thought and Commentary essay examines three sex panics in Hindu right-wing India. These panics illustrate how sex is deployed as socially constructed and naturally arousing to deny the material body while engaging its fleshy materiality in mediational populist politics. Sex as an unstable system of signification and its material truth effects are co-constitutive in propagating right-wing violence that resists being read as either caste or sexual atrocity and is symptomatic of an ongoing ambivalence towards the market.