Abstract:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This presentation explores how young unmarried Indian adults currently residing in Chandigarh, India navigate their sexuality. The research broadly addresses the following research questions: How is sexuality constituted in the lives of young people living in Chandigarh, India? How do various social institutions configure and consequently politicize sexuality in young people\u2019s everyday lives while living in Chandigarh? Participants included cis-gender and queer individuals between the ages of 19-23 of whom predominantly compose the middle-class in Chandigarh. The participants generally claim a Sikh or Hindu religious identity as well as specific caste-based identities within these religious ideologies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
During fieldwork from 2020-2021, participants shared their personal stresses, sexual curiosities, and personal and professional aspirations. It became clear that these three themes remain entangled in fated, traditionalist cultural scripts as the participants often place these at a junction in relation to one another in the contemporary moment. I propose that Indian youth in Chandigarh diverge from social norms or sexual scripts in a bid to fulfill their own desires, at times queering the sexual script. Ultimately, this study highlights the gendered realities of intimacy, virginity, sex, and queerness within a heteropatriarchal society to show how Chandigarh\u2019s youth define, discuss, and operationalize these concepts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The concepts intimacy and sexuality discursively traverse local and global registers. From ethnographic fieldnotes, we understand how these are employed, revealing much about how power moves to inform the interpretations and experiences of female, non-binary, and queer young adults in Chandigarh (Fahs and McClelland 2016). This presentation emphasizes how the spoken and the unspoken in discourses of sexuality highlight the power differentials and discursive registers at play to reveal sexual scripting specific to this region. I argue young people coming of age in contemporary India are negotiating their aspirations as they recursively revise sexual scripts they encounter across glocal (Herdt, Marzullo, and Petit, 2021) spatial registers in their daily lives, while also traversing their intimate self-making negotiations across social position of age, sex, caste, class, and gender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Part of: Queer Intimacies Abstract: This presentation explores how young unmarried Indian adults currently residing in Chandigarh,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"confab_track":[28],"session_locations":[32],"class_list":["post-731","confab_session","type-confab_session","status-publish","hentry","confab_track-cm-2","confab_location-seminar-room-2-cm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/confab_session"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":732,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/731\/revisions\/732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"confab_track","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fconfab_track&post=731"},{"taxonomy":"confab_location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fsession_locations&post=731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}