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Posts tagged ‘sexuality’

  1. On the “third-nature” – IV

    Thus far in this series, I have been examining early Indian textual sources for glimpses of how persons of non-normative sexualities or gender presentations were represented. For this post – as I promised at the end of the previous installment – dealing with ‘changes of sex’ – I will examine a text from a much later period,  a 16th-century Tamil version of the Brahmottara-Khaṇḍa, featuring the famous Queen Sīmantinī. The Brahmottara-Khaṇḍa is a section of the Skanda Purāṇa, that has been dated to between 700 -1150 C.E.

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    June 9th 2023

    Posted by in Gender, Queer, tantra

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  2. On the “third-nature” – III

    Continuing this series on non-normative sexuality and gender presentation in early Indian sources. This time, I will examine a couple of examples from medical (Āyurvedic) literature. Early Āyurvedic texts have much to say about how persons exhibiting non-normative sexual behaviors and presentations come about.

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    August 1st 2022

    Posted by in Gender, History, Queer

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  3. On the “third-nature” – II

    In the previous post in this series, I examined the representation of non-normative sexualities and gender presentations in the Code of Manu and the Kamasutra. This time, it is the turn of ‘queer’ Buddhist anxieties. Again, this is an expansion of a Twitter thread earlier in the year.

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    July 22nd 2022

    Posted by in Gender, History, Queer

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  4. On the “third-nature” – I

    Over on Twitter, I’ve been doing a series of threads examining early Indian texts of various kinds and how they present matters relating to non-normative sexualities and gender presentation, as a preamble to getting around to the tricky concept of “third-nature” (tṛtīyāprakṛti) in classical sources. In this series of posts, I will expand on my necessarily brief Twitter comments. It is complex stuff at times, but I shall strive for conciseness.

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    July 18th 2022

    Posted by in Gender, History, Queer

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  5. Book Review: Asexual Erotics

    The perception of Asexuality as an orientation has largely become more prominent since the late 1990s with the launching of AVEN (the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network in 2001) and the rapid increase of awareness and activism that it spawned in questioning assumptions regarding compulsory sexuality. While landmark researchers such as Kinsey had previously identified (with an “X”) those people for whom sexual desire was either very low or absent, bloggers and activists were at the vanguard of identifying Asexuality as a discreet orientation that was typified as “a person who does not experience sexual attraction.” Continue reading »

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    August 28th 2019

    Posted by in Book reviews, Gender, Queer

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  6. Jottings: On tantra and heteronormativity

    “To fit perfectly a man needs a woman, a woman needs a man. They are polar opposites, and that polarity is needed. It is just as if you are trying to create electricity without polar opposites, without positive and negative.”
    Osho

    If liberation could be attained simply by having intercourse with a śakti then all living beings in the world would be liberated just by having intercourse with women.
    Kularnavatantra

    In the wake of some of my posts discussing approaches to gender in a variety of Indian contexts, I’ve been engaged in some thought-provoking correspondence. One correspondent recently commented – “don’t you find that traditional tantra is well, really heteronormative?” Continue reading »

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    April 8th 2014

    Posted by in Gender, Queer, tantra

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  7. Book review: Bodies & Pleasures

    Michel Foucault’s work is everywhere these days, and even if you don’t read books on history, ethnography, feminism, sexuality or queer theory, then you will certainly find contemporary scholars exploring aspects of tantra – Hugh Urban, Geoffrey Samuel, Gavin Flood or Loriliai Biernacki for example – drawing on his work. If you’re wondering what all the fuss about Foucault is, then Ladelle McWhorter’s Bodies & Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalisation (Indiana University Press, 1999, 260pp, p/bk) might well be a good place to start. Continue reading »

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    June 14th 2013

    Posted by in Book reviews, Gender, Queer

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