Origins and the Anachronistic History of Sexuality

This paper will explore the peculiar question of origins in the development of queer studies and histories of sexuality. Methods in queer studies have sought to challenge the singularity of origins in the study of sex, particularly through Michel Foucault’s methodological insistence on an anti-foundational genealogy. Building on Foucault’s influential “Nietszche, Genealogy, History”, scholars have explored how sexuality’s history cannot simply be, in Foucault’s words, ”an acquisition, a possession,” but must instead be a history that may “threaten the fragile inheritor from within and from underneath.” How might historians use critical approaches to foundational myths in queer studies to think differently about how an attachment to origins shape histories of sexuality? As an illustrative case, I explore origins myths in texts on ancient Indian sex life and prostitution written by intellectuals from eastern India in the early twentieth century. I trace the simultaneous rise of philology and sexology for India – the study of ancient Indic languages and societies and the study of Indian sexuality. I suggest that the study of sexuality in ancient Indian civilizations became foundational more broadly to the modern study of sex.