Abstract
For gay, transgender, and sex worker activists, the state is a fraught site of aspiration, surveillance, violence, and even enchantment (p. 135). Chaitanya Lakkimsetti’s book Legalizing Sex: Sexual Minorities, AIDS, and Citizenship in India takes on this interface with an analysis of the “interconnected struggles” of these three groups in India, spanning the start of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s through to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era anti-sodomy law, in 2018, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act in 2019, and the struggles over the Anti-Trafficking Bill in 2018. The book offers an important postcolonial and transnational perspective to sociological scholarship on the state, sexuality, and social movements.
Lakkimsetti, engaged in Foucauldian theorizations of the state, suggests that the AIDS epidemic marked a shift in the Indian state’s regulation of sexuality from juridical to biopolitical power. Lakkimsetti argues that this biopolitical project is not simply a top-down totalizing effort: rather, it demands the active participation of the governed and thus opens up spaces for negotiation in ways that are “characterized by contestation, conflict, and instability” (p. 100). Thus, Lakkimsetti argues, “AIDS becomes a context where previously disenfranchised and marginalized groups begin to negotiate their livability” (p. 5). In drawing together sex worker, gay, and transgender activists under the common rubric of “sexual minorities,” Lakkimsetti opens up opportunities for comparative analysis while highlighting the links between sexual identities, gender identities, sexual acts, and sexual labor that upend the norm of monogamous heterosexuality (p. 7) and the common preoccupations that drive the regulation of all three.
The book draws on an impressively broad archive, weaving together close readings of Supreme Court decisions, legislative debates, policy documents, and activist reports; 85 interviews; and ethnographic observations from twenty months of qualitative research over eight years across Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Rajahmundry, and Chennai. The book begins with an analysis of shifting modes of governance in the age of AIDS. In Chapter One, Lakkimsetti unpacks the sex worker activist claim that “HIV is our friend” and shows how AIDS occasioned the state’s shift to a more complex, participatory mode of engagement with sexually marginalized groups. Through “friendship,” HIV-prevention efforts engage sex workers in the task of risk management and self-surveillance. In Chapter Two, Lakkimsetti turns to the ongoing violence that operates in parallel to these projects of partnership and documents moments in which juridical and biopolitical projects—for Lakkimsetti, specifically the police and HIV-prevention efforts—come into direct conflict. It is in this chapter that the contradictions within the state that the book seeks to highlight emerge most clearly.
The next two chapters focus on legal developments and the social movements engaged in securing them. Chapter Three focuses on sex workers’ struggle to challenge amendments to the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act (ITPA) and LGBTQ+ activists’ struggle to overturn Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Here, Lakkimsetti analyzes how activists in both cases used the moral legitimacy of HIV prevention to make rights claims. Chapter Four compares decisions in two Supreme Court cases: Suresh Kumar Koushal v. Naz Foundation, a 2013 case in which the Court reinstated Section 377, the anti-sodomy law that had been overturned in 2009, and National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) v. Union of India, a 2014 case in which the Court affirmed its recognition of transgender identities and paved the way for a range of redistributive rights. Lakkimsetti’s close reading of these two apparently divergent judgments reveals that both suggest “tolerance toward identities and intolerance toward sex acts.” Further, against critical feminist and queer scholars skeptical of rights discourses, Lakkimsetti argues that rights-based struggles are “simultaneously emancipatory and regulatory” (p. 103), as marginalized groups demand inclusion but also offer alternative articulations of social justice. In the book’s final chapter, Lakkimsetti examines the interconnections of rights struggles for these three groups. She shows, for example, how transgender groups are disproportionately affected by the criminalization of sex work and the criminalization of sodomy (until 2018) and how sexual minority groups articulate their rights in solidarity with each other and with other marginalized groups across class, caste, and religion.
Throughout the book, Lakkimsetti walks a careful line between analyzing the complexity of state strategies of regulation and noting the possibility of strategic activist engagement with the state, arguing that “this is not a simple story of surrender or resistance” (p. 134). In doing so, she builds on a rich tradition of feminist and queer scholarship on (and discomfort with) engaging the state. She is thoughtfully critical of recent state efforts to incorporate transgender rights, noting that “transphobic and transprotectionist approaches . . . are closely linked” (p. 133), while pointing out that “[s]ealing oneself off from processes of government that permeate all of society may not be an option; rather it may be more useful for activists to assume tactical positions within the regimes of governance themselves” (p. 125). For Lakkimsetti, struggles over sexuality center the law because of its “transformative potential” (p. 142), not just to guarantee rights, but to enable social justice.
The broad scope of Lakkimsetti’s analysis necessarily leaves some gaps. While pointing to the Indian state’s navigations of AIDS and of sexuality as an instance of “transnational governmentality” (p. 12) and documenting moments when transnational institutions played critical roles in Indian legal debates (p. 113), Lakkimsetti does not fully theorize how transnational institutions shape the struggles of sexual minority activists. The book engages less, for example, with scholarship on the transnational governance of the AIDS crisis. Her argumentation relies somewhat more heavily on textual analysis than on her extensive interview and ethnographic data. As such, in focusing on engagements with the state, the book tends to consider sex worker, gay, and transgender groups together, sometimes glossing over regional and ideological variations, conflicts, and organizing practices within and across these movements. Indeed, some of the most intriguing parts of the analysis develop comparisons across the three groups the book studies—contrasting the opposition to removing Section 377 with the relative lack of opposition to NALSA (p. 125), or the greater transnational support for gay groups compared to sex worker groups (p. 131).
The wide reach of Lakkimsetti’s study, however, also makes the book an accessible primer on recent developments in laws related to sexuality in India, laws that were changing rapidly during the period of the research. The book could be assigned in undergraduate or graduate courses on sexuality, the state, or social movements. More generally, in working across Indian and North American feminist scholarship, it contributes a postcolonial and transnational perspective that is often missing in North American sociological scholarship on sexuality.