Becoming Human: Illicit Desire and Licit Caste

 

The interlocking technologies of caste, gender, sexuality, and humanity continue to shape identity, agency, and citizenship in South Asia and beyond. This talk focused on the construction and consolidation of caste and examines its everdayness in both touchable and Dalit lives. It demonstrated how the choices that communities make about culture speak to much larger questions about inclusion, inequality, and the violence of caste. It centered new approaches to understand the transformative potential of the interlocking politics and the global history of gender, sexuality, and the human.

 

 

Dr. Shailaja Paik is Charles Taft Distinguished Professor of History and Associate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her first book Dalit Women's Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination (Routledge, 2014) examines the nexus between caste, class, gender, and state pedagogical practices among Dalit ("Untouchable") women in urban India. Her second book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity (Stanford University Press, 2022) focuses on the politics of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in modern Maharashtra. Her book won the 2023 John F. Richards Prize for most distinguished work on South Asia.