Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai
This paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women’s participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the ‘good life...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Routledge
2020
|
| _version_ | 1826261054192091136 |
|---|---|
| author | Krishnan, S |
| author_facet | Krishnan, S |
| author_sort | Krishnan, S |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | This paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women’s participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the ‘good life’, it makes two arguments. First: the paper unpacks the ways in which urban publics have been stigmatised as ‘unsafe’ for respectable women. It demonstrates that in practices of publicly-located sex, young women subvert this. They instead see private and commercial spaces – which have been celebrated as the locus of their liberation – as places of surveillance and discipline. Second: the paper interrogates how spatial governmentalities produce regimes of legitimacy that accrue to particular sexual acts. It argues that what ‘counts’ as sex is also determined geographically: by where the sex act occurs and what geographies of discipline and imaginaries of risk and respectability it evokes in its location. Both arguments draw attention to the ways in which contemporary discourses about the ‘risk’ of urban publics evoke the logics of development within which the construct of respectable femininity is located. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-06T19:15:31Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:18368e61-065b-4ba0-bd2b-6f3b66d77a15 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-06T19:15:31Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| publisher | Routledge |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:18368e61-065b-4ba0-bd2b-6f3b66d77a152022-03-26T10:42:07ZWhere do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in ChennaiJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:18368e61-065b-4ba0-bd2b-6f3b66d77a15EnglishSymplectic ElementsRoutledge2020Krishnan, SThis paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women’s participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the ‘good life’, it makes two arguments. First: the paper unpacks the ways in which urban publics have been stigmatised as ‘unsafe’ for respectable women. It demonstrates that in practices of publicly-located sex, young women subvert this. They instead see private and commercial spaces – which have been celebrated as the locus of their liberation – as places of surveillance and discipline. Second: the paper interrogates how spatial governmentalities produce regimes of legitimacy that accrue to particular sexual acts. It argues that what ‘counts’ as sex is also determined geographically: by where the sex act occurs and what geographies of discipline and imaginaries of risk and respectability it evokes in its location. Both arguments draw attention to the ways in which contemporary discourses about the ‘risk’ of urban publics evoke the logics of development within which the construct of respectable femininity is located. |
| spellingShingle | Krishnan, S Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai |
| title | Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai |
| title_full | Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai |
| title_fullStr | Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai |
| title_full_unstemmed | Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai |
| title_short | Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai |
| title_sort | where do good girls have sex space risk and respectability in chennai |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT krishnans wheredogoodgirlshavesexspaceriskandrespectabilityinchennai |