Abstract:

In the last two decades we have been witness to and have participated in acute confusions surrounding existing contours and claims of sexual subjecthood, starting from eruptions of the “sexual” into the domain of
publicness and leading to demands made on the state to recognise and legitimise sexual subjects.


The presentation works in two parts, as a return to the problem of the “sexual” in the Indian contemporary. The first part borrows from Freud to examine the moments at which the idea of what is “sexual” erupts into the
public domain as a “problem”, in the process also discussing questions of methodology. The second part revisits the feminist frame of ‘sexual politics’, including the ever-present slide between gender and sexual
practice within the term “sex” (Millett 1969), in an attempt to understand the conditions in which sexual-as-adjective simultaneously locates specific forms of violence, freedom and citizenship.


About the Speaker:

Nitya Vasudevan works as Programme Convenor of the Centre for Wellness and Justice, Baduku Community College (Samvada, Bangalore), which among other things conducts a PG Certificate Course on *Facilitating Women's Wellness and Justice*. She is also co-director of the Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF), along with nine others who all do it purely out of a mad love for cinema and film festivals. She completed her doctoral research from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (Bangalore) and has published her work in edited anthologies and in journals including the *Economic and Political Weekly*.