The history of South Asian feminist engagements on the state has produced a rich literature on governance and the exercise of power. Jyoti Puri's Sexual States is a recent addition to this literature, published in Duke University Press's series entitled Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies, edited by Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, and Robyn Wiegman. The series includes key components of new feminist thinking on the state, providing an alternative to work that presumes to cover the state, nationalism, and/or governance while conveniently excluding critical perspectives on concepts like the family, gender, sexuality, and public/private from its analytic purview. As a contribution to the Next Wave series, Sexual States can be read as part of a “wave” of research that aims to reassess the state as both an instantiation and an agent of neoliberalism—in this case, in relation to questions of legally regulating non-heteronormativity.

Puri's book is the result of ethnographic and archival engagements with official regulatory discourses on Section 377, India's contentious anti-sodomy law, and includes reflections on the campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality in India that are drawn from the growing literature in Indian queer studies. The book's primary aim is “to underscore the expanding significance of sexuality to states … especially at a time when states are understood to be in decline” (p. 5). Rather than examining regulation as a coherence of effects, however, the book engages in a critical statist exercise by concentrating on the official discourses of sexuality-related regulation. These discourses are evinced through National Crime Records Bureau statistics on police cases registered under the auspices of Section 377, as well as the 2009 New Delhi High Court decision on Section 377, which was in favor of “reading down” the law, and the 2013 Supreme Court decision, which ruled to uphold it on appeal.

Puri examines the regulation of homosexuality in India using several qualifying theoretical frames, referencing the “postliberal regional state” in a subsection of the introduction, and “biopolitical states” in later chapters. These frames are elaborated through references to wider national debates on sexual regulation, by discussing several other well-known examples of campaigns involving attempts to regulate, sequester, or otherwise curtail instantiations of non-heteronormative sexual practices. These are mostly drawn from the sphere of sexual commerce. For example, Puri writes, “Indeed an ensemble of vagrancy laws, allegations of theft and disturbing the peace, and the Immoral Traffic Prevention Act (amended most recently in 2006) [sic] variously place same-sex sexualities at risk” (p. 42). Drawing this kind of juridical link between the policing of public space, sex work, and contemporary queer politics raises important questions about how to deal with the question of sexuality in a nuanced critique of governance. For example, how are we to deal with a law like the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA) in relation to Section 377? While the ITPA's language is technically gender neutral, it is largely used to harass and extort cisgender women. Conversely, how are we to deal with a law like Section 377, which is ostensibly applicable in all instances of sex that is “against the order of nature,” but is often used to specifically harass and extort transgender sex workers while they are soliciting in public spaces? These questions are complicated by the fact that the 2005–6 attempt to revise the ITPA in the direction of prostitution abolitionism failed due to lobbying and protests organized by India's sex workers’ rights movements, which some LGBTQ activists also supported. The claim to the contrary notwithstanding, Puri's inclusion of sexual commerce in the book's analysis illustrates the ways in which questions of sexuality necessitate theorizing identity and practice without reducing one to the other, particularly in a critical endeavor that takes biopolitics is its primary theoretical frame.

One of the innovations of the book's methodology, as another reviewer has also remarked,Footnote ⁶ is in eliciting ethnographic evidence of how the New Delhi police may make easy connections between gay men, sex between men, and racialized minorities. Chapter 4 shows how, even in the absurdist tone that police take with one another in an exchange reported in the text, “accusations” of non-normative sexual practices among fellow officers slip easily from sexual to racial minoritization. The chapter highlights how rare ethnographic work with police continues to be.

The last two chapters of the book take the reader through the history of the legal campaign to decriminalize homosexuality, including the conflicts between the two major legal decisions in the case. The book culminates with discussions on recent developments in transgender jurisprudence, the New Delhi rape case of 2012, and the subsequent Verma Committee Report, as well as “anti-immigrant discourses in Delhi.” Ending as it begins, Sexual States strives to show that queer rights in India is about a great deal more than homosexuality and a single law, and that to understand sexuality politics in India is to understand statecraft writ large.