Sexing South Asia: Law, Activism, and Sexual Justice

A very quick look at the past two days! We hope the conference was thought provoking and inspiring for everyone :) Here's to imagining Another Politics.

(More pictures to come next week)

We've got a really exciting conference lined up this weekend!

19-20 July | NTH Complex, New Delhi

Please attend and bring your friends along!!

RSVP here https://www.facebook.com/events/640128913153166/ or by dropping a mail to [email protected]

Excited to share the titles for these two keynotes by Dr. Lynette Chua and Satya Transman Nagpaul! Come attend on the 19th and 20th 😄 @ NTH Complex, New Delhi

Use on social media if you're sharing this!!

Hi Friends,

Sandeepta Das will be doing a performance titled 'Expressions of Freedom' on the second day of the conference! 5:30-6:00pm, 20th July @ NTH Complex.

Here is a short description:

I was born to walk a road marked by my own choices
I was born to fight and lose, and get up again and fight till I see victory
I was born to break the shackles of your heteronormativity and Patriarchy
I was born to bleed my emotions into Art and Shapes and Words
I was born to be a bird who can decide her own flock
I was born this Way

Hope to see everyone there!! Please RSVP on our events page and feel free to share on all social media: https://www.facebook.com/events/640128913153166/

We'll be doing a reading of Pride by Danish Sheikh on Friday, 19th July from 4.45-5.45pm! NTH Complex, Qutab Institutional Area. Hope to see everyone there!!

Hi everyone!

Sexing South Asia - Law, Activism and Sexual Justice is going to be an exciting conference that will urge us reconsider how a politics of sexual justice can be auto-critical, intersectional, reparative and inclusive. We'll be exploring the role of legal institutions and the State in regulating, controlling and conforming gender and sexuality.

Dr. Lynette Chua and Satya Rai Nagpaul will be delivering the opening and closing keynote addresses. We also have some great panels lined up on each day. Please take a look at the schedule and come attend!

You can RSVP on the event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/640128913153166/ or drop a mail to [email protected] We hope to see you there!

Please also follow the Centre for Health Law, Ethics and Technology on social media :)

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We are delighted to announce that Satya Transman Nagpaul will be delivering the keynote address at the conference!

Satya is the Founder of Sampoorna, a network of Trans* and Intersex Indians. He is also an award winning Director of Photography, person of trans masculine experience, and Gender Activist.

Satya will be delivering the keynote on 20th July at Jindal Global Law School. For more information please write to [email protected]

We are excited to announce that Dr. Lynette Chua, Associate Professor of Law at National University of Singapore, will be delivering the opening keynote address at the conference!

Chua will be speaking on Love, Agency and the Ethnographic Study of Human Rights. We will update everyone shortly with details regarding the time and venue.

For more information, please email [email protected] and [email protected]

Deadline approaching! Please send in your abstracts by the 25th. We also welcome submissions for innovative panel formats.

CALL FOR PAPERS!!
Sexual Justice Conference 19-20 July 2019,
(Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat, Haryana, India)

Convenors: Dipika Jain (JGLS) | Debanuj DasGupta (UConn) | Paul Boyce (USussex) | Danish Sheikh (JGLS) | Oishik Sircar (JGLS)

Feminist and q***r studies scholarship has long attended to the paradoxes of pursuing sexual justice by recourse to the law. A known limitation of activist engagements with state legal systems to safeguard the rights of marginalized groups is the rigid classification of people and identities that accompanies legal recognition of rights. For example, while the highest courts of several countries in South Asia have recognized the fundamental rights of trans* people, the use of an umbrella term such as ‘transgender’ itself may erase and further disenfranchise communities that have their own terminologies, customs, ways of living and laws.

Over the last decade, courts across South Asia have passed historic judgments upholding the rights of gender and sexually marginalized persons. Such measures do not only pertain to those who might be considered marginal in respect to their gender difference or non-heteronormative sexuality. In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India struck down a ban on the entry of menstruating women to the temple of Sabarimala. This ruling was followed by other judgments that decriminalized consensual so**my between adults, and the offense of adultery.

Nepal’s Supreme Court in 2007 delivered a groundbreaking judgment guaranteeing LGBT individuals the enjoyment of all rights under the Constitution (then to be ratified) as well as international law and directed the State to ensure that they could access rights without any discrimination. In Pakistan, the Supreme Court in 2009 legally recognized a third gender category thus deeming transgender people as full and equal citizens. India’s Supreme Court in 2014 issued a similar judgment that upheld the right of self-identification for transgender people. In May 2018, Pakistan’s Parliament passed a comprehensive Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act that, inter alia, allows for self-identification and prohibits discrimination against transgender people at schools, workplaces, and when receiving medical care. In November 2013, the government of Bangladesh officially recognized Hijra persons as third gender. However, such recognition came with intrusive medical examinations, and, erroneous ideas about sex/gender-based identities.

These judgments and legislations indicate an emerging set of shifts in sexual and gender mores in respect of legal status in the present moment of rising cultural and economic populism, engendering complex consequences for the way we perceive the relationship between law, sexuality and justice in South Asia. The capacity of the State to call sexual subjects into being as recognizable figurations may run counter to other formations whereby q***r folk exist predominantly outside of such authorities or visualizations.

The celebration of current landmark judgments must also be tempered with analyses that pay attention to the intersections of caste, class, religion, regional disparities, gender and sexuality.

Does entry into Sabarimala, for instance, signal freedom for all women or only upper-caste women? Does the State become a beacon of secularism when it advances women’s rights by declaring religious practices as unconstitutional? What does it mean to fight for love amidst the growing ‘saffronization’ of the LGBT movement in India? What makes activists repeatedly resort to the right to privacy to demand decriminalization of so**my when it carries the potential to reify the public-private divide? Whose narratives are represented in q***r activism and whose have been deliberately left out? How is ‘transgender’ being defined differently across diverse countries in South Asia, and how is the governmentality of recognition producing newer kinds of regulation of bodies? How do we think about law when it is simultaneously a site of constraint and liberation? How might legal reform in South Asia be foreshadowing the emergence of new areas of regional activism regarding same-sex marriage or civil partnership? How might incipient issues pertaining to inheritance between same-sex partners run with or against other means of codifying property in relation to kinship, lineage, socio-economic privilege and law? Against the background of such questions, the relation between law, history and nature is taking shape as an especially dense web of evolving meanings and actions in contemporary q***r praxis in South Asia.

We seek interdisciplinary works that explore such changes and challenges to reconsider how a politics of sexual justice can be auto-critical, intersectional, reparative and inclusive. In doing so, we want to further wonder how we might address the gaps in implementation that inevitably result after groundbreaking judgments are delivered. We also aim to reconsider the role of legal institutions and the State in regulating, controlling and conforming gender and sexuality.

Please send in your abstracts (no more than 500 words) by April 25, 2019. We also welcome innovative panel formats, incorporating alternative modes of engagement such as performances. These panel proposals must not be more than 1000 words.

This conference is being organized in collaboration with The Centre for Health Law, Ethics and Technology at Jindal Global Law School; the Departments of Geography and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Connecticut, and the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex.

A more detailed call with submission guidelines is available here:http://chlet.jgu.edu.in/pdf/Sexual-Justice-Conference-2019.pdf

For any questions or concerns, please get in touch with the secretariat of the conference at [email protected] and [email protected].