Navaneetha Mokkil, "Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work, and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala" (U Washington Press, 2019)
The vibrant media landscape in the southern Indian state of Kerala, where kiosks overflow with magazines and colorful film posters line roadside walls, creates a sexually charged public sphere that has a long history of political protests. The 2014 \u201cKiss of Love\u201d campaign garnered national attention, sparking controversy as images of activists kissing in public and dragged into police vans flooded the media. In\xa0Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work, and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala\xa0(University of\xa0Washington Press, 2019), Navaneetha Mokkil tracks the cultural practices through which sexual figures\u2014particularly the sex worker and the lesbian\u2014are produced in the public imagination. Her analysis includes representations of the prostitute figure in popular media, trajectories of queerness in Malayalam films, public discourse on lesbian sexuality, the autobiographical project of sex worker and activist Nalini Jameela, and the memorialization of murdered transgender activist Sweet Maria, showing how various marginalized figures stage their own fractured journeys of resistance in the post-1990s context of globalization.\nBy bringing a substantial body of Malayalam-language literature and media texts on gender, sexuality, and social justice into conversation with current debates around sexuality studies and transnational feminism in Asian and Anglo-American academia, Mokkil reorients the debates on sexuality in India by considering the fraught trajectories of identity and rights.\nShraddha Chatterjee is a doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto, and author of Queer Politics in India: Towards Sexual Subaltern Subjects (Routledge, 2018).\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies