Violence of Democracy

Interparty Conflict in South India

RUCHI CHATURVEDI

Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist, Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, Chaturvedi investigates the unique character of the conflict between the party left and Hindu right. This conflict, she shows, defies explanations centering religious, caste, or ideological differences. It offers instead new ways of understanding how quotidian political competition can produce antagonistic majoritarian communities. Rival political parties mobilize practices of disbursing care and aggressive masculinity in their struggle for electoral and popular power, a process intensified by a criminal justice system that reproduces violence rather than mitigating it.

Ruchi Chaturvedi is Senior Lecturer of Sociology at the University of Cape Town.

Making Gaybies

Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling

JAYA KEANEY

Feminist scholar Jaya Keaney explores the multiracial politics of queer family making, using reproduction as a key site for reformulating intimate citizenship. Working in dialogue with scholarship in queer theory, critical race theory, and feminist studies of reproduction, Keaney argues that the queer and multiracial are coconstituting, pointing out uses of mixedness as a form of queer capital. The text draws on interviews with parents and children in Sydney and Melbourne, sequentially following the journey of queer family making through assisted reproduction. Woven throughout the book are themes of choice, restriction, biology, and love, each of which play an important role in the queer family making process. Through examples of assisted reproduction technologies and examination of the biosocial construction of racial inheritance, Keaney extends current critical race approaches and contributes to feminist scholarship on reproduction and the fertility industry.

Jaya Keany is Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne.

August 2023

280 pages, Postcolonial and Colonial Studies / Anthropology / Asian Studies / South Asia

Rights: World

November 2023

240 pages

Gender and Sexuality > Queer Theory, Science and Technology Studies > Feminist Science Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies

Rights: World

August 2023

314 pages

Gender and Sexuality / LGBTQ Studies / Music / Ethnomusicology / Cultural Studies / Affect Theory

Rights: World