Ashwini Tambe

The State as Surrogate Parent: Legislating Nonmarital Sex in Colonial India, 1911–1929

This essay reviews the raising of the age of consent for nonmarital sexual relations in early twentieth century India. Historians have exhaustively studied how child marriage came to be restricted, but have largely overlooked a parallel set of legal efforts to raise the age of consent for sex outside marriage. Reformists in the 1910s and 1920s steadily increased the minimum age specifying when girls could give their consent to sex with “strangers”—those who were not their husbands. Although these measures drew on international antitrafficking discourses, their major focus lay in entrenching parental control over daughters’ sexual practices. Indeed I argue that the 1929 law restricting child marriage, which effectively undermined parental control, was facilitated by the prior and concurrent measures that fixed a higher age of consent for nonmarital sex. A key contribution of my essay is its critical analysis of how apparently protective measures undermined girls’ sexual agency. I also trace how reformists seeking to raise the age of consent positioned themselves as actors on a world stage. In situating reforms on the age of consent in India within an international circuit of influence, my analysis reaches beyond the dyad of British-Indian relations that frames many feminist histories of colonial India.

Climate, Race Science and the Age of Consent in the League of Nations:

In this article I explore how, in the League of Nations’ emerging anti-trafficking regime of the 1920s and 1930s, one category of race science — climate — played a prominent role in positing natural hierarchies between nations. My purpose is twofold: (1) to explain the currency of climate at this moment and to examine the trajectory of climate as an explanatory device in the intellectual history of ‘race’; and (2) to reflect on the biopolitical implications of explanations rooted in climate. The article begins with a description of how League of Nations delegates used climate as shorthand to refer to differences between the sexual mores of various nations. I then reflect more broadly on the emergence, submergence, and reemergence of climate in the history of race science, and its effects in practical settings. I move to a discussion of the significance of the age of consent as a category, and analyse the League of Nations-sponsored efforts to track ages of consent across countries as a biopolitical project. My overarching argument is that references to climate performed important ideological work in naturalizing hierarchical relations between nations. In arenas where diplomats sought to arrive at a consensus, such references rendered them more palatable and less disputable.

Sexual Incitement, Spectatorship and Economic Liberalization in Contemporary India

In this essay we seek to trouble the easy conflation of sexual and economic liberalism in contemporary India. Even as new regimes of consumption connect narratives of economic freedom with sexual freedom, there remain many constraints on womens ability to express sexuality in creative and autonomous, rather than obligatory and scripted, ways. Focusing on two recent episodes – proposals to ban cheerleaders in cricket performances in Maharashtra and the vigilante attacks in pubs and streets on women in southern Karnataka – we analyse reactions across varied political positions, including those of official womens organizations. Our goal is to bring theories of spectatorship to bear on understanding the politics of these episodes. We emphasize distinctions between the contexts of performance and reception, and argue that womens attire and conduct can be read in heterogeneous ways. Our aim is to seek a more effective feminist response to such controversies, and to articulate a vision of sexual autonomy that is not necessarily linked to hegemonic consumer behaviour.

Book review forum: Philip Howell, Geographies of Regulation: Policing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; 312 pp.: 9780521853651, £55 (hbk).

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