It is a good time to take stock of paths and markers in the cultural battleground of sexualities in India. To note the impossibility of quantifying wins and losses because this war against moral panics cannot be measured by legislative gains. The politics of sexuality in the arts as well as the everyday in india lies, rather, in a fecund grey area that bristles with the sheer audacity of imagined and real pleasures. In some crucial sense, it must always remain audacious.

Contents

Preface

1.Introduction
The Audacity of Pleasure
II.Explorations
1.The desiring subject : Female Pleasures and Feminist Resistance in Deepa Mehta's Fire

2.In Desire and in Death :
Eroticism and Politics in Arundhati Roys
The God of small things
3.Modernity, Globality, Sexuality and the City : A Reading of
Indian Cinema
4.Of Displace Desires :
Interrogating 'New'Sexualities and New Spaces in Indian
Diasportic Cinema
5.Dangerous Liaisons:
Sex Work, Globalisation, Morality and the State :
in Contemporary India
6.Hijra Intimacies and Inheritances
7.Notes on Queer Politics in South Asia and its Diaspora
8."The Most Intimate Act'
The Politics of Gender, Culture and Translation
9.Ristk and Pleasure:
A Case for Queer Erotica
10.The Erotics of Risk
Feminism and the Humanities in Flagrante Delicto

III Speculations
1.When the Towel Drops :
Sexuality, Censorship and Cinema
2.The Long Arm of Colonial Rule
377 and censorship
3.The Ubiquitous F-Word
Musings on Feminisms and Censorships in South Asia
4.Of Desire and Dissensus :
Tagore and Ray
5.No More Goddesses, Please:
On the Abused Goddesses campaign

IV Adventure

1.Gay for More than a Day of Rage
2.What NExt?
On the 'Kiss of Love'Protests
3.Vigilantism - Left, Right and Wrong
4.Some Notes Toward Queering the Humanities in the University
5.Other Goddesses of the Forbidden Quarters : A Photo Essay

V.Epilogue
A Fragment, on Grave Pleasure

Includes bibliographical references.