At the Crossroads of Language, Race, and Sexuality

This chapter explores how researchers have examined race and sexuality as mutually implicated dimensions of language use and interpretation. While past descriptions of language have inadvertently conflated these dimensions by foregrounding certain speakers and erasing others, recent research has decentered the privileged gaze of whiteness and heterosexuality by examining the language of racially and sexually marginalized communities and by exploring the semiotic mapping of hierarchies of race onto those of sexuality. The chapter analyzes interactions among Korean American girls who highlight the sexual value of locally racialized body parts, illustrating how their acts of intersectional highlighting allow them to contest the sexual devaluation of Korean bodies while reproducing the very ideologies they challenge. Researchers are encouraged to reflexively consider their own strategies of intersectional highlighting by asking what ends are served—and not served—when making intersectional facts visible in their analyses.

“When spotted deaths ran arm’d through every street”: Women-Healers and the Great Plague in Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders

In the late 1600s, England was reeling under the recurrence of the pandemic that had swept continent-wide in the 14th century. However, it was not the only disease lurking around. At the heels of the scarlet-ringed Black Death, came the scarlet letter of witchcraft accusations, mostly geared towards Wise Women in the margins of society- women who exhibited knowledge and skill in medicine, herbal remedies and midwifery. Set in the time when religious fanaticism and Puritanical fear-mongering was at its height, Year of Wonders presents before us an opportunity to delve into the web of lies and life-threatening allegations that formed the bedrock of the English witch trials continuing in full swing since the incursion of Continental lore ever since James I came to power. Furthermore, with midwives and female herbalists in the area falling prey to targeted sexual and physical violence in the wake of the pandemic in the story, what needs to be inspected is the inescapable link between Church-backed patriarchy’s delusional fear, jealousy and consequent scapegoating of the economically and socio-sexually marginalized woman-healers in the countryside and the failure of the male-dominated medical field in effectively containing the spread of the virus. The paper investigates further the generational flow of biomedical wisdom in a female-oriented domain which becomes significant in the presentation of the two female leads inheriting the function of the Wise Women from the original holders of the position, thus solidifying the sense of found family and sisterhood standing against the mounting social pressure to bend to the will of the Church and the men in their lives.

“HIV Is Our Friend”

This chapter provides an overview of HIV/AIDS policies as well as how sexually marginalized groups are drawn into biopower programs as “high-risk” groups. In 1983, when HIV/AIDS was first detected among sex workers in India, the state’s initial response was to blame the sex workers themselves as well as to forcefully test them and confine them in prison. However, it proved impossible to incarcerate every sex worker and to stop the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Instead, I argue, ultimately a consensus formed that supported giving marginalized groups a leadership role in tackling the epidemic. Drawing on ethnographic observations and the HIV/AIDS policy of the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), this chapter also highlights how these biopower projects deepened the involvement of high-risk groups as they moved from simple prevention to behavioral change. Ultimately, communities became extensions of biopower projects as they implemented these programs at the day-to-day level.

Tolerable Identities, Intolerable Sex Acts

This chapter comparatively focuses on rights struggles of gay groups and transgender/hijra groups by focusing on two seemingly contradictory judgments of the Indian Supreme Court—the Koushal judgment of 2013, which declared Section 377 constitutional, and the same court’s 2014 NALSA decision, which granted rights to transgender groups—in order to discuss the impact of these legal decisions on the rights and recognition of LGBTKQHI groups. While the NALSA judgment made nonnormative gender identities legal, the Koushal judgment retained Section 377 and therefore upheld the idea that sexual acts considered to be against the “order of nature” were criminal. The chapter illustrates that while years of social activism have led to the tolerance of identities (today LGBTKQHI groups regularly organize pride marches and rally their political identities in public), nonnormative sexual acts remained criminal until 2018. The legal dichotomization of acts and identities has very important implications for the rights of sexually marginalized groups.

“A More Thorough Resistance”? Coalition, Critique, and the Intersectional Promise of Queer Theory

Queer theorists have long staked their politics in an engagement with intersectionality. Yet intersectional scholars have been some of queer theory’s most vocal critics, decrying its failure to adequately engage persistent inequalities. I approach this seeming paradox in three parts. First, I situate intersectionality within the field of critical theory, arguing that it shares critical theory’s view of power. Both traditions, I argue, understand power to generate the very marginalized figures that it subordinates. Second, while intersectional and queer theories share this critical insight, the two frameworks offer fundamentally different understandings of what constitutes a democratic politics of redress. Where intersectional theorists promote coalition-building between differently marginalized subjects, queer theorists tend to figure sexually marginalized subjects as exemplary democratic agents. Finally, I argue that this slippage in conceptions of democracy has had negative consequences for critical theory and highlights the difficult but essential role of coalition as a political resource.

Eksploitasi Concubinage dan Subjek Subaltern: Hegemoni atas Perempuan Indonesia dalam Tinjauan Kritis Pascakolonial dan Feminisme Novel De Winst Karya Afifah Afra

Tulisan ini membahas praktik kolonialisasi Belanda yang mengakibatkan terjadinya bias ketidakadilan gender terhadap posisi perempuan Indonesia dalam novel De Winst karya Afifah Afra. Bias ketidakadilan gender ini tercermin dari adanya eksploitasi secara seksual terhadap kaum perempuan dengan menjadikan mereka sebagai concubinage atau gundik dan menjadi subjek subaltern akibat praktikal hegemoni kekuasaan kaum laki-laki kulit putih kolonial Belanda. Melalui pendekatan teori pascakolonial dan ragam kritik sastra feminisme pascakolonial diperoleh suatu pemahaman bahwa kaum perempuan pada masa kolonial menjadi subjek yang termarginalkan, baik secara seksual maupun sosial. Kaum perempuan tidak memiliki bargaining power dalam ranah hukum untuk menuntut adanya pengakuan sebagai istri yang sah dan memiliki kedudukan yang terhormat, bukan menjadi korban dominasi kekuasaan laki-laki atas tubuh, baik secara seksual maupun tenaga untuk urusan domestik rumah tangga (double burden), termasuk juga stereotipe negatif yang cenderung merendahkan harkat dan martabatnya sebagai perempuan. Abstract : This paper discusses the practice of Dutch colonization which resulted in a gender injustice bias toward the position of Indonesian women in the novel De Winst author by Afifah Afra. This is reflected from the practical sexual exploitation against women by making them as concubines (concubinage) or “wives” who are actually represented as a concubine because of no formal “diperistri” by white people and become the subject of subaltern or oppressed because of the practical power of the male hegemony white man of Dutch colonial. Through a variety of postcolonial theory and postcolonial feminist literary criticism, the analysis gained an understanding that women in the colonial period became the subject of both sexually marginalized and social. These women had no bargaining power in the realm of law to demand the recognition of the legitimate as a wife and a respectable position, not a victim of male domination of power over the body, either sexual or domestic labor for their household affairs (double burden ), including negative stereotypes that tend to lower their dignity as women. Key Words: concubinage; subaltern; colonialism; theory of postcolonialism; postcolonial feminist literary of critics