South Asian Sexual Praxis

Alternatively, sexuality is taken as a simultaneous site of pleasure and danger for women. The double entendre found in Sringar Lavani or kalbelia performed by women allows lyrics to be read as depicting both the pleasures of sex for women. Importantly, such cultural studies create possibilities for more complicated analyses of women’s sexuality. The studies reviewed indicate that South Asian sexual praxis is produced by and through a variety of factors, although it is clear that not all factors are fully captured or explored in the literature, nor of equal significance. However, the recurring aspects in the literature draw the general contours of South Asian sexuality. It is characterized by patriarchal hetero-normativity yet includes bisexual …show more content…
Taking sexuality and gender as overlapping yet distinct terrains means that we can examine sexuality not simply as a derivative of gender relations and identities but as constituting a distinct culture and set of social relations and identities that interact with, yet can be studied separately from, gender. The focus enables an examination of the ways in which sexual arrangements are attached to racialized relations of power, particularly within tourism-oriented prostitution and transactional sex settings, where constructions of race and ethnicity structure possibilities for young women and men in different ways, and mediate and transform traditional gender relations of power. It allows for studies of the ways in which sexuality is reconfigured through new technological innovations and new imperialisms, and for examinations of the production of new identities, expressions and transactions, and new sexual …show more content…
It is believed that the sex drive of the human female is naturally and innately stronger than that of the male, and it once posed a powerfully destabilizing threat to the possibility of social order. For civilized society to develop, it was allegedly necessary or at least helpful for female sexuality to be stifled. Countless women have grown up and lived their lives with far less sexual pleasure than they would have enjoyed in the absence of this large-scale suppression. Socializing influences such as parents, schools, peer groups, and legal forces have cooperated to alienate women from their own sexual desires and transform their sexually voracious appetites into a subdued remnant. The double standard of sexual morality has condemned certain sexual activities by women while permitting the identical actions for men. In some cases, surgical procedures have been used to prevent women from enjoying sex. From some perspectives, these societal forces have deprived most individual women of their natural capacity to enjoy multiple orgasms and intimate gratifications. Women have felt that they are not permitted by society to express their sexual feelings or even to enjoy sex in many contexts. Men may also have suffered, at least indirectly, insofar as they have been deprived of the pleasures that come from having partners who enjoy sex. In the