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Paper short abstract

Bedroom Politics is an unfolding multimodal anthropology of intimacy, voice and silence. Rooted in queer, feminist, and decolonial thought, it listens to textures of desire and the politics of sexuality within and beyond South Asian context - through sensory ethnography and poetic acts of refusal.

Paper long abstract

Bedroom Politics invites us to dwell with what remains unspoken behind closed doors. Embracing the unfinished as an ethical stance, it foregrounds voice as method and moves within a politics of showing and hiding. Refusing voyeurism and embracing polycentric, queer visualities, this work centres collaborative authorship and questions how sound itself may bear witness to embodied truths.

Through the weaving of visual ethnography, life histories, soundscapes, and community dialogue, Bedroom Politics invites us to ask: how is sexuality shaped, expressed, and policed within South Asian and transnational contexts? How do bodies and experiences of intimacy and consent bear the weight of social histories and cultural forces? Drawing nourishment from anthropology, queer theory, and feminist wisdom (Foucault, 1976; Butler 1990, 1993; Berlant and Warner, 1998, and Srinivasan et al 2021) and in dialogues with the histories of pornography, digital cultures, and public space - including #MeToo in India - this project traces how shame, longing, and recognition move across intimate and collective spheres.

Emerging through 26 hours of recorded life histories with South Asian collaborators, and through an iterative, evolving artistic practice, Bedroom Politics is not a closed archive but a living dialogue. It seeks to trouble normative scripts around sexuality, gender, power, and to imagine more expansive, more ethical futures for sexual narratives. Asking us to look closely at what is often unseen, it explores the public presence of sex and the layered, intimate politics of desire, tenderness, and harm that so often remain unspoken behind bedroom doors.