Unruly Figures
-
Navaneetha Mokkil
-
Edited by:
Piya Chatterjee
About this book
The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of political protests. The 2014 “Kiss of Love” campaign garnered national attention, sparking controversy as images of activists kissing in public and dragged into police vans flooded the media. In Unruly Figures, Navaneetha Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures—particularly the sex worker and the lesbian—are produced in the public imagination. Her analysis includes representations of the prostitute figure in popular media, trajectories of queerness in Malayalam films, public discourse on lesbian sexuality, the autobiographical project of sex worker and activist Nalini Jameela, and the memorialization of murdered transgender activist Sweet Maria, showing how various marginalized figures stage their own fractured journeys of resistance in the post-1990s context of globalization.
By bringing a substantial body of Malayalam-language literature and media texts on gender, sexuality, and social justice into conversation with current debates around sexuality studies and transnational feminism in Asian and Anglo-American academia, Mokkil reorients the debates on sexuality in India by considering the fraught trajectories of identity and rights.
Author / Editor information
Reviews
"This is an elegantly written book that makes a persuasive case for what Mokkil frames as a queer reading practice of dissident sexuality that works to keep such tensions open."
---"Social commitment and intellectual vigour make this journey adventurous, and the author transmits its spirit through her evocative, lyrical writing."
---"Unruly Figures provides a provocative and theoretically rich account of the uneven terrain of contemporary sexual politics."
Topics
-
Download PDFPublicly Available
Frontmatter
i -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Contents
v -
Download PDFPublicly Available
Acknowledgments
vii -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Introduction: Sexual Figures of Kerala
1 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter 1 Tracing the Prostitute: Between Excess and Containment
53 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter 2 To Claim the Day: The Sex Worker as Subject in the Time of AIDS
89 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter 3 Wandering in the Vernacular: Divergent Visions of Queerness
126 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter 4 Living Together, Dying Together: The Politics of Lesbian Hauntings
160 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Chapter 5 “What You Think Is Fire . . .” Unspooled Movements and Suspended Readings
186 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Notes
207 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
References
239 -
Requires Authentication UnlicensedLicensed
Index
261
