How does culture make sex? Navaneetha Mokkil assembles a vernacular archive in order to approach this question as a means of diagnosing sexual publics and politics. Reading films, autobiographies, popular cinema, interviews, and exhibitions with and against the grain, Mokkil elaborates dissident sexual subjectivity as a “stuttering,” “wandering,” “loose dancing,” and “haunting” expression with political effects. In her analysis, such expression exceeds the tropes of visibility and voice that govern the conception of the sexually liberated subject as an autonomous bearer of rights in a rational field of politics. She focuses on the post-1990s period, when sex workers and lesbians emerged as political actors on the Indian subcontinent.
Mokkil's central concern is to conceptualize political subjectivity in such a way as to “keep alive the tensions, incommensurabilities, and hauntings of being dispossessed” (p. 26). She conceptualizes the public as “as [a] contingent force field of fears, desires, and anxieties” (p. 34) and frames culture as a territory of “ephemeral acts and twilight zones of resistance” (p. 40), as well as a zone of regulation and normalization. In Mokkil's analysis, cultural figurations of sexual personhood—sex worker, lesbian—make publics and politics.
Whereas many scholars of sexuality focus on questions of identity or economy, Mokkil trains her eye on matters of space and place. She is attentive to the regional particularity of Kerala as well as the formations of publics and counter-publics. Across five chapters, she argues for the value of working within a vernacular archive, not only as a means of producing a nuanced understanding of Malayali sexual cultures, but also as a method for generating novel conceptualizations that might travel across fraught terrains of sexual politics. One conceptualization I find especially useful is “sexual event,” which she defines as happenings that speak directly to the politics of sexuality, such as the murder of the prostitute Kunjeebi by police, or cultural texts that circulate widely, such as sex worker Nalini Jameela's two autobiographies. The mediatization and circulation of sexual events shape the contours of publics and privates and the politics they mobilize. Using the concept of sexual events, Mokkil brings temporality and spatiality together in a theory of sexual politics.
For example, in a chapter focused on lesbian suicides, she draws on interviews conducted by an activist organization in the wake of a case of double suicide undertaken by Ammini and Meera in 2001 in Kerala. Whereas efforts to overturn the colonial-era antisodomy penal code Section 377 have dominated queer politics at the national level, in Kerala, lesbian suicide became a central issue in campaigns for sexual justice. Exploring the politics of lesbian haunting allows Mokkil to bring into focus the particularity of a regional sexual politics and to explore the ways in which the past and the dead animate present possibilities of political articulation. What does it mean for our conception of politics that the lesbian emerges as a political subject in the wake of lesbian suicide? Our conception of politics, Mokkil contends, should be instructed by such nonprogressive temporalities as haunting.
Mokkil is interested in the interplay and exchange between figuration and subject formation. In her deft and sensitive readings of cultural texts, she investigates the ways in which sexual figures such as the sex worker, the lesbian, and the transgender person shape the possibilities of sexual subjectivity. At the same time, she is keen to demonstrate the ways that subjects—sex workers, lesbians, and trans* women—complicate and trouble their figuration. For example, in her analysis of the autobiographies written by Nalini Jameela, she notes that the author's self-narration troubles the binary posed between domesticated women and sex workers: “I look after my family, I also do social work, and when in financial need, as someone in my situation often is, I do sex work” (p. 109). The figure of the “Kerala woman”—educated, oriented toward family planning, domesticated—has played a key role in the admission of the state into national discourses of progressive women's development. At the same time, Mokkil show us, such progress comes at a cost as tribal women, Dalit women, sex workers, and lesbians are figured as the constitutive outside of conjugal domestic sexual respectability. In situating herself as both domesticated and sex working, Nalini deploys the respective valence of these figures, but also disrupts the mutually exclusive relation typically posed between them. Sexual subjects draw on and reformulate sexual figures even as their own sexuality is shaped by such figures.
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. Close attention to the language of melodramatic love and mourning as well as that of rationality and rights in the memorialization of lesbians, for instance, allows her to raise questions about our assumed models of political subjectivity. In arguing that we should embrace these tensions, questions, blurrings, stutterings, and wanderings, rather than succumb to the longing for neatly defined identities or clear political strategies, Mokkil not only provincializes global paradigms of and for sexual liberation, she also offers us a novel method for theorizing sexual politics.
