Intimations of Dissent: Sexuality’s History
Lecture by Prof. Anjali Arondekar (UC Santa Cruz) during the Workshop “Abundance: Queer Worldings in Anthropology” organized by the Working Group “Gender & Sexualities | Queer Anthropology” on March 8 2023 at Schwules Museum Berlin
Suturing histories of sexuality to histories of dissent, this talk rearranges the grammar of our ethical engagements with the past and present. At stake here are the historical vernaculars -the data- that found the evidentiary regimes of rights and representation for subaltern queer/trans subjects. What I offer here are archives of andolan/protest, meditations that move between the heady inspirations of protest and the stultifying violence of state practices. Andolan is after all a movement in Hindustani music, an alankar (combination/ornamentation of notes) that oscillates between one fixed note and its counterpart, touching, suffusing, all that lies in between. Let us imagine such an historical andolan together.
Anjali Arondekar is Professor of Feminist Studies, and Founding Co–Director, Center for South Asian Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research engages the poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on Indian Ocean Studies and South Asia. She is the author of “For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India” (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010), winner of the Alan Bray Memorial Book Award for best book in lesbian, gay, or queer studies in literature and cultural studies, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2010. She is co–editor (with Geeta Patel) of “Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2016). Her second book, Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023), grows out of her interest in the archival figurations of sexuality and caste in British and Portuguese colonial India. Read the introduction here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/abundance
Lecture by Anjali Arondekar “Intimations of Dissent: Sexuality’s History“
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editorial team (July 5, 2023). Intimations of Dissent: Sexuality’s History. AnthroDesires. Retrieved July 14, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/b7va
