Unruly Figures

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.

Navaneetha Mokkil is an assistant professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the co-editor of Thinking Women: A Feminist Reader (Bhatkal & Sen, 2014). This is her first book.Chatterjee Piya :

Piya Chatterjee is professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Scripps College. She is the author of A Time for Tea: Women, Labor and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Duke, 2001) as well as the coeditor of The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (Minnesota, 2014) and States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (New Delhi: Zubaan Press, 2009).

Navaneetha Mokkil is assistant professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is the coeditor of Thinking Women: A Feminist Reader.

"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."

"Mokkil deftly reads, in an in-depth and sustained manner, a range of materials that constitute zones of publicity and intimacy in Kerala, drawing out how figurations of gender and sexuality mark this fraught terrain. Linking Indian and Anglo-American feminist and queer studies to these readings, the analysis makes a strong case for the importance of the regional as a site for new directions in critical scholarship."—Ritty Lukose, author of Liberalizations’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India; Associate Professor of Anthropology | Gender and Sexuality Studies |South Asian Studies at The Gallatin School, New York University

"In the long history of writing about queer theory both in South Asia and beyond, Mokkil’s study is unique in bringing Kerala and sexuality studies together in a powerfully pointed yet capacious way. Mokkil marshals such an enormously productive conclave of materials -- video from events, art video, art catalogues, films, epistolary writing, autobiographies, published interviews, archives in different genres, and more conventional ethnographies – that the monograph becomes its own evidentiary corpus that flows into descriptions that are a pleasure to peruse. Mokkil’s theoretical interventions blended into this book as an archive, promise to make this monograph one that readers will turn to over and over."—Geeta Patel, Author of Risky Bodies and Techno-Intimacy: Reflections on Sexuality, Media, Science, Finance; Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures and Women, Gender and Sexuality, University of Virginia