CSAS Lecture Series | On Trying to Kill a Sexologist: Prison Science and the Minor Revolutionary Life of Homosexuality in Colonial India

This talk reframes the early 20th-century colonial prison in India as a sexual scientific laboratory, arguing that it grounded a new architecture of sexual science tied to the science of confinement. Sequeira will explore a scandal between subordinate medical officers and the colonial prison establishment centered around the latter’s attempt to suppress scientific studies on the scope and etiology of homosexuality in prisons. Focusing on Calcutta (and the Andaman Islands settlement) prisons, the talk will show how prison medical officers’ experiments on and desire to correct subaltern sexual “deviants” helped reconstitute the architecture of the prisons they administered from association-based prisons to cellular-based ones. Second, it will show how such investigations shifted from foregrounding anatomical observation to documenting prisoners’ voices to frame Indian homosexuality as a problem of habitual “native” racial and cultural excess. In the process, however, these studies negated prisoners’ individuality and inflicted both psychological and physical forms of trauma on them—provoking repeated assaults on prison officers’ lives. Finally, it will document how the state prevented the circulation of such studies, anticipating outcry about exposing Indian political prisoners to potential sexual abuse. The talk will thus theorize an imperial will-to-ignorance as an alternative epistemology for understanding Indian, particularly subaltern sexual life, in contrast to the European metropolitan paradigm of the will-to-knowledge.

Rovel Sequeira (he/they) is an LSA Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. They are affiliated with the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, where they co-direct the Global South Gender and Sexuality (GS2) Collective. Rovel is currently working on a book manuscript on sexual scientific histories and fiction in India, tentatively titled The Empire and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India. Their work has been published in Modernism/modernity, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and History of the Human Sciences, among other venues.

Made possible with the generous support of the Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

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