Anjali Arondekar

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496 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 1 May

Anjali Arondekar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society · Sex Work in Colonial India · 1 May 2026 podcast

But what is respectability becomes something that whoever's in power decides.

So I think that the Contagious Disease Act, that's why I said the translation across the ocean means that something else happens to it.

But it also opens up this fantastic new era.

And I would say any of your listeners, even if you're not historians, this material is available for free online at the British Library.

What it opens up is this field of medical jurisprudence, which is basically a fancy way of saying you can forensically examine bodies for whatever.

So when I was doing my archival work, you have this prosecution and containment of sexuality on the one hand.

And when you're reading these cases, you have, as I write in my chapter on sodomy, you have extended discussions of subtended anuses and onanism, which is basically another word for masturbation, because the language of medical jurisprudence allows you to say all those things.

So the two most important things in this period are pornography.

In pornography, you can say what you like because it's pornography.

But as I write in my book, if you read colonial pornography, it keeps the colonial racial logics in place.

Right.

So you have black men who are rapists in this colonial pornography, but Indian men are not allowed to have sexual contact with white women.

So even in this fantasy of racial transgression, Indian men are still kept as factotums.

They are never seen as predators because that would materialize a fantasy and a desire and a fear that nobody wanted to calculate.

And medical jurisprudence was another place, right?

So if you're a doctor, so there are lots and lots of records and you're reading this and going, what the hell is going on, right?

How are they giving us such explicit semen samples, all of this, right?

At the same time as when they're saying we can't talk about sex.

Quite.

But I think the question is that we know that, but the challenge is what do we do with that knowledge?

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