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Sanjay Sirvastava (ed.), New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004
Recent discussions of sexuality within South Asian contexts have been limited by a number of problematic ideologies, assumptions, and institutionalized forms of oppression, including sexism, homophobia/heterosexism, capitalism, colonialism, and orientalism. Discourses on sexuality in South Asia have most often focused on heterosexual men's interests, desires, and experiences, emphasizing in particular what Sanjay Srivastava refers to as "`semen anxiety' -- where `loss' of semen is equated with loss of masculine strength and `life-force'" (14). When the topic of gender arises, scholars have been primarily concerned with themes like family planning (relying on population control frameworks), and women's sexual victimization in traditional South Asian societies. As such, discussions of gender and sexuality are rarely attentive to the nuanced and complex forms masculinity and femininity may take in South Asia, the particular meanings sexual identities and/or practices may have in local contexts, or the specific forms of resistance employed by South Asians.
Sexual Sites, Seminal Attitudes: Sexualities, Masculinities, and Culture in South Asia, edited by Sanjay Srivastava, addresses these issues by intentionally broadening the discourse on sexuality in South Asia. Concerned with problematizing conventional frameworks that they critique as overly simplistic and unable to account for social differences among subjects, the authors of Sexual Sites intervene into contemporary debates at various level, materially and theoretically, situating themselves within multiple disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, literary analysis, history, geography, film studies, media studies, and public health. Attentive to both colonialist discourses and "simplistic representations of the postcolonised condition" (17), Srivastava, in his introduction to Sexual Sites, resists any easy dichotomies between "east" and "west," and between past and present, along with a host of other...