Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code is one among the large and complex system of laws, policies, and practices aimed at mitigating the threat of homosexuality. This statute endangers a range of subjects, including religious minorities, who are troublingly considered prone to same-sex behavior.

In Sexual States, Jyoti Puri tracks the efforts to decriminalize homosexuality and to show that the regulation of sexuality is fundamentally tied to the enduring existence of the state in order to understand how Section 377 is governed. Through extensive fieldwork among state institutions, she finds that the law and state agencies such as the police are pre-occupied with managing sexuality and its perceived threat to the social order. Equally interested in efforts to modify Section 377, this book draws on encounters with sexuality rights activists to highlight the approaches and strategies that have evolved over the course of their struggle.

Sexual States also discusses the shutting down of dance bars, modifications in rape laws, and efforts to curtail migration from Bangladesh to show that regulating sexuality more generally helps uphold regional and national states as inevitable, legitimate, and indispensable. By highlighting the heterogeneous sexual states in the Indian context, Puri provides a framework to understand the links between sexuality and the state. 

This book will be of significant interest to scholars and students of sexuality and gender studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and legal studies.

Jyoti Puri is Professor of Sociology at Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts.

Acknowledgments

Part I. Introduction

1. Governing Sexuality, Constituting States

2. Engendering Social Problems, Exposing Sexuality’s Effects on Biopolitical States

Part II. Sexual Lives of Juridical Governance

3. State Scripts: Antisodomy Law and the Annals of Law and Law Enforcement

4. “Half Truths”: Racializations, Habitual Criminals, and the Police

Part III. Opposing Law, Contesting Governance

5. Pivoting toward the State: Phase One of the Struggle against
Section 377

6. State versus Sexuality: Decriminalizing and Recriminalizing Homosexuality in the Postliberalized Context

Afterlives

Notes 
Bibliography
Index