Human Rights, Gender and Sexuality Studies

C. Riley Snorton tells readers, "Black on Both Sides is not a history per se, so much as it is a set of political propositions, theories of history and writerly experiments." (6) I found Snorton's intentional disruption of our assumptions about what constitutes "a history"-a disruption that continues throughout the text-an apt analogy for the book's theoretical interventions.

Over the past 70 years, the history of acceptance of the lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) community within the United States has seen much change and fluctuation. One of the places that this dialogue has been preserved is through the syndicated advice columns of Dear Abby and Ann Landers, in which individuals in the United States were writing in for advice to deal with their anxiety over a newly emerging and highly visible new community of individuals once considered to be mentally ill and dangerous. Using discourse analysis, this article traces the evolution of public and scientific opinions about the LGBT community during the years leading up to the Stonewall riots all the way to right before the AIDs epidemic. This analysis sheds light on several moral panics that emerged regarding this newly visible population, especially in regard to disturbances within the domestic sphere and a stigmatization of bisexuality.

This paper uses the prison as a point of entry to understand the relationship between the British East India Company administrators during colonial rule in India, and its citizen-subjects in the mid-late nineteenth century. The question I seek to answer is: How was the rise of imprisonment as the primary means of punishment in the early years of Company rule related to the development of native subjectivities in colonial India? I argue that central to the rise of the colonial prison regime was the enforcement of classificatory logics, i.e.: defining, ordering, and dividing the prison population. Anxieties around “moral contamination”, enmeshed with Victorian-era evangelical Christian ideals of morality, and discourses around health and hygiene, made the classification of prisoners an essential feature of prison discipline. Classificatory logics were not only a means of managing deviancy and crime but also an end in themselves, used to control and discipline the native population as a whole. Furthermore, the emphasis on classification contributed to the production and sustenance of specific categories of gender, race, class, caste and tribe. I demonstrate that gendered meanings of the colonial encounter were co-constituted in the prison regime, which (re)produced a male/female gender binary, the sexual division of labour, and norms of compulsory heterosexuality.

Transgender persons in India have historically been subject to violence and erasure through laws that have criminalised their lives and livelihoods. Despite recent legal and judicial developments that have purported to correct these historical wrongs, transgender persons' relationship with the penal state continues to be fraught, evident in laws and practices that either target them, or address them as a distinct category, or neglect them entirely. One such site of legal and policy exclusion is a space that is itself relegated to the peripheries of public thought-the prison. Transgender persons in prison are likely to face particular harms on the basis of their gender identity that are compounded by harms that characterise the conditions of confinement. This paper is a preliminary inquiry into the status of transgender persons in Indian prisons. It demonstrates that while transgender persons are policed, criminalised, and made 'hyper-visible' in public spaces, they are 'invisible' in laws, rules, and practices that are framed for prison management. Further, it argues that centring the self-narratives of transgender prisoners is a necessary first step in understanding their experiences of prison and developing legal and policy responses.

As part of its work on equality and non-discrimination, CLPR conducted a study on experiences of intersectional discrimination in South India between May – November 2018. The objective of the study was to understand the relationship between different intersecting identities and various sites of discrimination such as educational institutions, workplaces, police stations, and public transport.