Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in India his paper explores ignorance as an ethnographic standpoint in research on sexualities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers viewpoints on secrecy among men who have sex with men in India. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the north of West Bengal, research explored ways in which same-sex desires and practices did not necessarily correlate to an explicit sense of (same-sex) sexual subjectivity. For men who took part in the research same-sex sexual affection and affect were typically most meaningful 'intersectionally', in respect of other aspects of their life-worlds, such as kinship, ethnicity and work, all of which resonated with wider social tensions in West Bengal at the time of fieldwork. Same-sex sexuality was commonly salient to people through experiences of indirection and absence, as opposed to explicitly articulated facts about sexual subjectivities. This was not simply a matter of well-kept sexual secrets, but also an attribute of a socio-cultural milieu within which sexual practices and relationships (between men) were most often possible and palpable because of social misrecognition (as non-sexual). This raises wider questions about the relationship between sexual object-choice and subjectification (in contexts such as India) and the usefulness of sexuality as a domain term in ethnographic enquiry. In many ways ignorance was an especially useful ethnographic viewpoint during fieldwork, in that accenting the acquisition of explicitly knowledge about same-sex sexual lives (as if characterized by clearly objective properties) was in many ways dissonant from the social worlds being explored.