Abstract
This article analyses the sexual innuendos, the ‘irreverent’ postures and the sex talk which marked a number of ethnographic encounters with women in north India. While these encounters discursively harassed the anthropologist’s interpretive categories, Indian women’s ‘excess of agency’ established a joking intimacy with her. Where encounters radically subverted aspects of the representational history of women across colonial and postcolonial India, their novel representational possibilities opened up new ones for those women writing on them. Finally, encounters signalled the urgent need for research in the largely unknown terrain of heterosexuality in India, and this research’s potential to rethink the semantics of gender.
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