Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality and The Department of History, Ashoka University, invite you to a guest lecture by Rovel Sequeira (University of Michigan) on "Queering the Prison: Criminal Intimacies and the Minor Revolutionary Life of Homosexuality in Colonial India".

The lecture will be held at AC-02, 203, on September 4, 1.30 PM.

This talk frames the early 20th century colonial prison in India as a sexual scientific laboratory, arguing that the site of the prison grounded a new architecture for sexual science tied to the
science of confinement. In the talk, 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 nature of homosexuality in prisons.

Focusing on Calcutta and the Andaman Islands settlement prisons, he will show how prison medical officers’ experiments on subaltern sexual “deviants” helped reconstitute the architecture of the prisons they administered from association-based prisons to cellular-based ones.

Second, Sequeira will show how such investigations shifted from foregrounding anatomical observation to documenting prisoners’ love letters 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, he will document how the state prevented the circulation of such studies, anticipating potential outcry from Indian political prisoners about sexual abuse, as recounted in their prison memoirs. The lecture 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 is Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and of English, by courtesy, at the University of Michigan where he co-directs the Global South Gender and Sexuality (GS2) Collective. Dr. Sequeira is currently working on a book manuscript on sexual scientific histories and fictions in India, tentatively titled The Empire and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India. His work has been published in Modernism/modernity, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, History of the Human Sciences and is forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms and the Oxford Handbook of LGBTQ History.