The first comprehensive assessment of the diverse sexual practices of India: transsexual, homosexual and heterosexual.

Ishtyle follows queer South Asian men across borders into gay neighborhoods, nightclubs, bars, and house parties in Bangalore and Chicago. Bringing the cultural practices they are most familiar with into these spaces, these men accent the aesthetics of nightlife cultures through performance. Kareem Khubchandani develops the notion of “ishtyle” to name this accented style, while also showing how brown bodies inadvertently become accents themselves, ornamental inclusions in the racialized grammar of desire. Ishtyle allows us to reimagine a global class perpetually represented as docile and desexualized workers caught in the web of global capitalism. The book highlights a different kind of labor, the embodied work these men do to feel queer and sexy together. Engaging major themes in queer studies, Khubchandani explains how his interlocutors’ performances stage relationships between: colonial law and public sexuality; film divas and queer fans; and race, caste, and desire. Ultimately, the book demonstrates that the unlikely site of nightlife can be a productive venue for the study of global politics and its institutional hierarchies.

This book studies recent transformations in the area of law and gender in modern India. It tackles legal and social developments with regard to family life, sexuality, motherhood, surrogacy, erotic labour, sexual harassment in the workplace and violence against women, among others. It analyses reform efforts towards women's and LGBTIQ rights and attempts to situate where a reform has taken place, by whom it was brought about, and what impact it has had on society. It engages with protagonists who shape the debate around law and gender and locate their efforts into a socio-political context, thereby showing that the discourses around law and gender are closely connected to broader debates around pluralism, secularism and religion, identity, culture, nationalism, and family. The book offers compelling evidence that the drivers of change are emerging from beyond the traditional institutions of courts and parliament, and that to understand the everyday implications of gender based reform, it is important to look beyond only these institutional sources.

The erotic and the intellectual come together to create a new kind of criticism in the lushly written work of Joanna Frueh. Addressing sexuality in ways that are usually hidden or left unsaid, Frueh—a noted performance artist and art historian—explores subjects such as aging, beauty, love, sex, pleasure, contemporary art, and the body as a site and vehicle of knowledge. Frueh's language is explicit, graphic, fragmented. She assumes multiple voices: those of lover, prophet, daughter, mythmaker, art critic, activist, and bleeding heart. What results is an utterly original narrative that frees us from the false objectivity of traditional critical discourse and affirms the erotic as a way to ease human suffering. Through personal reflection, parody, autobiography, and poetry, Frueh shows us what it means to perform criticism, to personalize critical thinking. Rejecting postmodern, deconstructed prose, she recuperates the sentimental, proudly asserts a romantic viewpoint, and disrupts academic and feminist conventions. Erotic Faculties seeks to free the power of our unutilized erotic faculties and to expand the possibilities of criticism; it is a wild ride and a consummate pleasure. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

A fresh and challenging re-evaluation of the interrelationship between sexual and gender behavior and aggression. Drawing on a series of previously unpublished controlled research studies on rapists, pedophiles, incest offenders, voyeurs, transsexuals, and homosexuals (among others), the book offers startling new findings- e.g., crossdressing and feminine gender identity in rapists believed to be ultra-masculine, aggressiveness in pedophiles believed to be shy and passive. This book brings a new perspective to understanding sexual anomalies and to the conceptual foundations on which clinical research and treatment of these behaviors rests.

Bollywood’s New Woman examines Bollywood’s construction and presentation of the Indian Woman since the 1990s. The groundbreaking collection illuminates the contexts and contours of this contemporary figure that has been identified in sociological and historical discourses as the “New Woman.” On the one hand, this figure is a variant of the fin de siècle phenomenon of the “New Woman” in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the Indian context, the New Woman is a distinct articulation resulting from the nation’s tryst with neoliberal reform, consolidation of the middle class, and the ascendency of aggressive Hindu Right politics.

Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors. Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang

First published in 1987. The major theme of this book is that sexual aversion or sexual phobia (that is, a persistent or recurrent extreme discomfort with or avoidance of all, or almost all, genital sexual contact with a sexual partner) is more difficult to treat when accompanied by panic disorder; treatment may fail unless anti-panic medication (for example, tricyclic antidepressants or monoamine oxidase inhibitors) is prescribed and sex therapy is modified to accommodate to the special needs of these patients. Throughout the book, the author, based on her experience with 51 such cases (17 case vignettes are presented), advocates Klein's theory that patients with panic disorder suffer from a constitutional, biologic abnormality in the form of a defective or malfunctioning anxiety-regulating mechanism in the central nervous system, and their symptoms including sexual aversion represent an abnormal continuation into adult life of the protest phase of “separation anxiety.

An iconic filmmaker and inheritor of the legendary Satyajit Ray’s legacy, Rituparno Ghosh was one of the finest auteurs to emerge out of contemporary Bengal. His films, though rooted firmly in middle-class values, desires and aspirations, are highly critical of hetero-patriarchal power structures. From the very outset, Ghosh displayed a strong feminist sensibility which later evolved into radical queer politics. This volume analyses his films, his craft, his stardom and his contribution to sexual identity politics. In this first scholarly study undertaken on Rituparno Ghosh, the essays discuss the cultural import of his work within the dynamics of a rapidly evolving film industry in Bengal and more largely the cinematic landscape of India. The anthology also contains a conversation section (interviews with the filmmaker and with industry cast and crew) drawing a critical and personal portrait of this remarkable filmmaker.