CSH is please to announce that Shailja Tandon, a senior research associate at Lead at Krea University and associate researcher at CSH, transformed her MPhil dissertation in a book, entitled “Sexuality Reimagined, MSM in Modern India“, published by Palgrave Macmillan Singapore on 2023. She also worked as Research Coordinator at the CSH under the supervision of Pro. Nicolas Gravel on the project “CHALLINEQ”.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7063-4

About the book: The book examines how medical knowledge is produced around bodies that do not fit in the heteronormative framework of the state’s rationale and processes. The marginal bodies studied in this research are termed MSM, men who have sex with men, categorized as a high-risk group in the backdrop of HIV/AIDS. These Queer bodies entered the registers of epidemiology and governmentality. This classification is the point of departure for the book. The book interrogates and asks how does a sexual subject become a political question? To answer this political trajectory, the book analyses the category of risk in biomedicine. It investigates how the category of risk becomes critical to the Indian state’s rationale and policies wherein, through the ambit of health and population, sexuality is managed. Unearthing the sexual politics in South Asia, the book, based on rich empirical evidence derived from the lived experiences of MSM, narrates the construction of sexual subjectivity and masculinity. The process of construction occurs in negotiation with the Indian state, bringing forth the dimension of the Indian state as a medico-legal governmentality regime and how MSM takes on the identity of a medicalized subject.