'Theoretically sophisticated yet full of ethnographic detail, this book is a major contribution on several levels - to our understanding of the changes sweeping through contemporary India, but also through much of the rest of the world. Globalisation, the author shows, is not just an external force but penetrates to the core of both the self, the body and the emotions. Individuals and groups who rebel against established norms of sexuality are redefining those very terms in so doing. The interplay between modernity and tradition expresses itself in the complex connections between desire, self- representation, and intimacy on the one hand and the wider impact of capitalism and the market economy on the other.' Anthony Giddens, King's College London
List of Figures; List of Abbreviations; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Bioengineering, Beauty and Racial Sensibility; 3. Contesting Violence, Constructing Power; 4. Festival, Spectacle, Eroticism; 5. Biopolitics and Biosocial Citizenship; 6. Performative Participation, Sexual Health and Community Development; 7. Cosmopolitanism: Rights, Citizenry and the Culture of Representation; 8. Postscript; Glossary; Index.