Kumaramkandath, Rajeev, PhD Student

By Stine Adrian on 27 Aug | 0 comments

Rajeev Kumaramkandath is PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) in Bangalore, India.

RESEARCH PROJECT
The Discursive Production of Sexual Subjects in a Postcolonial Context: Sexual Morality and Homosexuality in the 21st Century Keralam

This project attempts to make an understanding of the current notions of morality and codes in Keralam, India and their role in governing the construction of gendered bodies, desires and selves against the background of the society’s colonial and post colonial history and the ongoing changes in its economy under the aegis of globalization. The discourse on the issue of morality (sadacharam) as propagated by the colonizer during the 19th century and proliferated in the society through the various apparatuses including the law, will be juxtaposed against the current structure of morality. The core concern is to see how the logical framework, in the broad sense of that term, extended by the 19th century discourse prevail amidst albeit seemingly drastic shifts in the realms of economy and individual relations.

The notions of morality thus prevailing combined with changes in the material spheres resulting in the different manifestations of the alternative desires – in the form of lesbian suicides, in the construction of the homosexual subject, the emerging sexual identity politics etc., – is precisely the point for investigation. The local specificities associated to the formation of subject in the context of Keralam, in one sense could be equated to that of similar and other developed contexts at the same time as articulating the limits for such equating exercises.

Sexual morality and homosexuality signify, on their respective turns and in their mutual infringement and encroachment, the shifts within the broader paradigms of modernity as also the limits imposed upon such shifts. Reality lies within the space between these shifts and their limits which are broadly represented by power relations and the discourses within which the subjects are constituted as also the contours in the realm of materiality associated to these constitutions.

In other words the conditioning of sexual subject, in a postcolonial/third world locale, is scrutinized by the discursive limits of modernity in shifting towards a more liberal and individual centric mechanism. This project analyses discourses on the topic of sexuality/homosexuality/gender in the current Keralam, and juxtaposes the sexual morality that is emerged out of these against the queer experiences.