Indian sex life: Sexuality and the colonial origins of modern social thought
Indian sex life: Sexuality and the colonial origins of modern social thought
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印度性生活：性行为与现代社会思想的殖民起源
DOI：
10.1080/09589236.2022.2159113
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发表时间：
2022
影响因子：
1.7
通讯作者：
Chandrica Barua
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Chandrica Barua
在1889年的短篇小说《城墙上》(On The City Wall)中，鲁迪亚德·吉卜林首次将这句名言与卖淫联系在一起，这句话是世界上最古老的职业。这篇短篇小说发生在印度殖民地的拉合尔(现为巴基斯坦)。拉伦是这个故事中的妓女主人公，她挥舞着自己的性取向作为统治男人的武器，她必须一次又一次地被点名，详细描述，重申，并跨知识领域寻找(第3页)。拉伦代表着东方主义知识工程的不足，总是超越和超越它的极限和局限，但她也是它的起源和框架。以拉伦为榜样，德巴·米特拉交织了20世纪印度妓女的历史形象，以及作为概念、科学和意识形态辩论和意义的场所的“妓女”。米特拉汇集了一系列令人震惊的档案材料--文献学研究、法律调查、法医调查、社会进化科学和通俗现实主义文学--米特拉试图重写印度妓女的知识史，并揭示作为知识和调查对象的印度与卖淫或变态女性性行为之间的认知相互依存关系。在这个雄心勃勃的项目中，女性性行为被突出地作为南亚思想史和社会史的中心分析。米特拉的理论框架包含了女权主义历史批评、酷儿和性史中的方法、关于殖民知识的辩论和次要人物的史学挑战的交叉。米特拉的史学故事从19世纪80年代到50年代印度性爱领域的跨地区崛起开始，kama(欲望)，由于这一点，女性成为殖民和孟加拉知识分子、印地学家和社会分析家们喋喋不休的学术对象。通过研究、翻译和改编古代和中世纪关于性的论文，如《卡玛经》(约2/3世纪；1883年以英文出版)、《阿南加牧歌》(约16世纪)和《科卡沙斯特拉》(约11/12世纪)，妇女的性行为被框定在乱交、过度和性变态的负面联系中，这些都与低种姓妇女的行为有关。法律对“妓女”一词的理解包括属于“乞讨宗教教派、高种姓印度教一夫多妻制、婆罗门教寡妇、公开表演形式、穆斯林婚姻习俗、妇女移民、妇女劳动和种姓限制”的妇女(第67页)。变态的女性身体被认为是疾病的携带者和私生子的凶手，而在社会上，出现了一个新的“亲密监视”环境(第89页)，其中包括家庭、邻居、洗衣工、看守人和一个线人网络，以监测妇女及其潜在的犯罪行为。在这一时期，对堕胎的法医学描述较少涉及女性的安全和健康，更多的是对童贞测试的淫秽描述，女性私生活的私密细节，以及往往是无端的解剖探测。使用亨利·缅因、约翰·麦克伦南和约翰·巴霍芬等维多利亚时代民族学家的模型，以及马克斯·米勒的单基因语言和种族进化理论，以及奥古斯特·孔德和拉马克的实证主义科学进步模型，《殖民时期的人的网络》(第25页)
In the 1889 short story ‘On the City Wall’, based in Colonial India’s Lahore (now in Pakistan), Rudyard Kipling first attached the adage,‘the world’s oldest profession’, to prostitution. Lalun is the prostitute protagonist of this story, who wields her sexuality as a weapon to rule men, and who ‘must be named again and again, described in detail, reiterated and sought across fields of knowledge’(p. 3). Lalun represents the inadequacy of the orientalist knowledge project, always transgressing and exceeding its limits and confines, but she is also its genesis and framework. Using Lalun as her model, Durba Mitra interweaves the historical figure of the 20th-century Indian prostitute, and the ‘prostitute’as a site of conceptual, scientific and ideological debate and signification. Assembling an astonishing range of archival material–philological studies, legal surveys, forensic medical investigations, social evolutionary science and popular realist literature–Mitra attempts to rewrite the intellectual history of the Indian prostitute, and reveals the epistemic interdependence between India as an object of knowledge and investigation, and prostitution or deviant female sexuality. In this ambitious project, female sexuality is foregrounded as a central analytic in the intellectual and social histories of South Asia. Mitra’s theoretical framework inhabits the intersections of feminist historical critique, methods in queer and sexuality history, debates about colonial knowledge and the historiographic challenge of the subaltern.The historiographical story that Mitra ‘recovers’ starts with the trans-regional rise of the field of Indological erotics between the 1880s and the 1950s, kama (desire), due to which women had become an object of belaboured scholarship for colonial and Bengali intellectuals, Indologists and social analysts. Through the study, translations, and revisionist appropriations of ancient and medieval treatises on sex such as the Kama Sutra (circa 2nd/3rd century; published in English in 1883), the Ananga Ranga (circa 16th century) and the Koka Shastra (circa 11th/12th century), women’s sexuality was framed with negative associations of promiscuity, excess and sexual perversions which were linked to the behaviour of lower caste women. The legal understanding of the term ‘prostitute’included women who were part of ‘mendicant religious sects, high-caste Hindu polygamy, Brahman widowhood, forms of public performance, Muslim marriage practices, women’s migration, women’s labour, and caste strictures’(p. 67). The deviant female body was named as the carrier of diseases and the murderer of illegitimate foetuses, while in society, a new environment of ‘intimate surveillance’(p. 89) emerged that included families, neighbours, the washer-men, the watchmen and a network of snitches to monitor women and their potential for crimes. Medico-legal accounts of abortion in this period were less invested with women’s safety and health, and more so with salacious descriptions of virginity testing, intimate details of women’s private lives and often, gratuitous anatomical probes. Using models from Victorian ethnologists such as Henry Maine, John McLennan and Johann Bachofen, as well as Max Müller’s monogenic linguistic and racial evolution, and the progressive models of positivist science from August Comte and Lamarck, the ‘network of men’(p. 25) in colonial