Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai

Abstract

This paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women’s participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the ‘good life’, it makes two arguments. First: the paper unpacks the ways in which urban publics have been stigmatised as ‘unsafe’ for respectable women. It demonstrates that in practices of publicly-located sex, young women subvert this. They instead see private and commercial spaces – which have been celebrated as the locus of their liberation – as places of surveillance and discipline. Second: the paper interrogates how spatial governmentalities produce regimes of legitimacy that accrue to particular sexual acts. It argues that what ‘counts’ as sex is also determined geographically: by where the sex act occurs and what geographies of discipline and imaginaries of risk and respectability it evokes in its location. Both arguments draw attention to the ways in which contemporary discourses about the ‘risk’ of urban publics evoke the logics of development within which the construct of respectable femininity is located.

Keywords:

• Development
• gender
• India
• public sex
• risk
• respectability

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kanchana N Ruwanpura, as editor, and to the anonymous reviewers of this paper (especially Reviewer 1) for pushing me to improve the paper’s analytical focus. I am also grateful to the following for comments on drafts and discussions that shaped my thinking: Sarah Hodges, Caroline Osella, Nandini Gooptu, Miriam Driessen, Aniruddhan Vasudevan and Anusha Hariharan.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sneha Krishnan

Sneha Krishnan is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. She is interested in how histories of colonialism and imperial afterlives shape experiences of childhood and youth. She is currently writing a book about women’s hostels in Southern India, and has ongoing projects on gender and archival practice, as well as on the race and gender politics of domestic renovation.