Sex Education: Need of the Hour

Sex education, despite the everlasting force of modernisation in other regards, has remained a contentious issue, especially in India. This short note attempts to briefly explore the history of sexuality and how societal perspectives and expectations have evolved with time. The importance of sex education and sensitisation cannot go ignored for much longer. This paper makes reference to the recommendations of prominent international organisations and makes recommendations of its own, all with the objective of limiting stigma and precipitating sexual/reproductive welfare.

Teaching the History of Sexuality with Images

This article outlines how an in-depth engagement with visual archives has transformed the author’s pedagogical practice. It argues that working with visual sources like photographs and illustrations offers students important opportunities to develop key academic skills, and to think critically about archives and sources. It details how working with such rich materials makes space for personal reflection and discovery, especially for students engaging with histories of sex and sexuality for the first time. Outlining the strengths of this approach, it explores some of the tensions and obstacles inherent in doing this kind of work—discussing, for example, the ethical dilemmas faced when reproducing and disseminating sexualized images in the classroom, the complexities of handling student reactions, and the activities students and the instructor have created to negotiate these issues.

Sodomites, witches, and Indians: Another look at Foucault’s history of sexuality, volume one

Does Foucault’s work on sexuality open toward the possibility of a genealogy of sex understood as binary anatomical and genetic sexual difference? I believe that it does. I argue that, if we take seriously work by Mark Jordan, Ann Laura Stoler, and Sylvia Federici, coupled with Foucault’s own statement at the end of HS1 that sex is not an anchor for sexuality but, rather, “a complex idea that was formed inside the deployment of sexuality” (152), the possibility of a time before sex or an elsewhere apart from sex becomes quite thinkable. Constructing such a genealogy would likely require careful research into ways in which Europeans imposed binary sex upon those they terrorized and colonized around the globe. Examples gestured toward here include the Yorùbá in Africa as well as a number of peoples of the Americas.

Reading Confessions of the Flesh as the Second Volume of the History of Sexuality

Summary In this article, I propose a different reading of Foucault’s newly published work than suggested by the publishers and in initial reviews. I question the claim that it represents the fourth volume of the History of Sexuality and rather propose to regard it as an intended second volume. Comparing Foucault’s final plan of publication of the series with the background and stated purpose of Les aveux de la chair, I hold that it is part of a different philosophical project than volumes two and three. Foucault wrote Les aveux de la chair to explore the roots of modern power in the experiences that early Christianity occasioned. This makes the work relevant for current theology and the philosophy of religion.

Synthesizing Religions: Vasily Rozanov’s “Phallic Christianity”

Vasily Rozanov was one of the first Russian writers of the fin de siècle to create a nexus between the study of the history of world religions and the history of sexuality. He viewed Christianity’s asceticism as a source of the disintegration of the contemporary family. This article examines Rozanov’s strategy to synthesize religions and to use pre-Christian religions of the Middle East as proof of common physical and metaphysical essence in celestial, human, animal, and mythological human/animal/divine bodies. I argue that while his rehabilitation of the physical life by endowing it with religious value was socially positive, his self-proclaimed “mission of sexuality”, when politically motivated, was manipulative and incorporated the notion of the atavistic ‘survivals’. In conclusion, I explain that Rozanov’s monistic search for the divine in the physical body as well as his strategy to synthesize religions were additionally driven by his personal doubts in the preeminence of Christian eschatology.

Myths of Age and Sexual Maturity

Ashwini Tambe. 2019. Defining Girlhood in India: A Transnational History of Sexuality Maturity Laws. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.