In the Abusable Past’s latest installment of “What We’re Reading,” Durba Mitra (Assistant Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard) talks with Abusable Past co-editor Jecca Namakkal about her book Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020). Listen to Dr. Mitra talk about the origins of her project, her feminist approach to intellectual history, and how her work on the colonial origins of female sexuality speaks to present issues around sexuality and gender in India today.
Further work by Durba Mitra
“Sexual Science as Global History” Gender & History, 31, No. 2 (July 2019): 500–510.
“Sociological Description and the Forensics of Sexuality” in Guy Attewell and Rohan Deb Roy (eds), Locating the Medical in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 23-46.
“History’s Apology: Sexuality and the 377 Supreme Court Decision in India” Epicenter, September 2018.
“Translation as Techné: Female Sexuality and the Science of Social Progress in Colonial India” History and Technology, 31, 4 (2016): 350-375.
Co-authored with Mrinal Satish, “Testing Virginity, Evidencing Rape: Medical Jurisprudence and Rape Adjudication in Colonial and Postcolonial India” Economic and Political Weekly 49, 41 (October 11, 2014): 51-58.