The Asian nation's state's new interest in managing domestic life, particularly sexuality, was examined in a three-panel symposium sponsored by the Asian Diaspora Working Group called "Sexuality and the National Body in Asia" last Tuesday. The event began in the Rose Art Museum and continued in the Women's Studies Research Center.The Working Group on Asian and Asian Diaspora Studies, formed last year, is a group of students and faculty who are interested in both Asian and Diaspora studies. The group emphasizes study involving different parts of Asia, such as India and Japan, in conjunction with one another. "We look at the links and connections between the various fields," Prof. Sarah Lamb (ANTH) said.

"The three of us [Profs. Ellen Schattschneider (ANTH), Harleen Singh (WGS) Lamb] have been involved in the Asian Diaspora reading group, a loose association of faculty and students meeting from time to time to read material of mutual interest. We are trying to bridge the more conventional divides of, oh that's East Asia, that's Japan. It's so easy for academic work like this to get pigeonholed, but [the symposium] was really an open forum for discussion between different groups," Schattschneider said in an interview after the symposium.

The symposium portion was divided into three panels: Figuring the National Body in South Asia, Sexuality, Power and Literature in Japan and Reports from the Field: Transnational Asian Sexualities.

Schattschneider talked about some of the overarching themes of the conference. "In relation to the nation state and the nation state's interest in the national body, there's this interesting transformation in the Asian context between the state's lack of interest in mediating sexuality in the private sphere prior to the late 1860s, and then suddenly the nation state's interests become allied with managing the domestic sphere," she said.

During the first panel, presenter Jyoti Puri of Simmons College addressed sodomy law in India. "The discourses of sexuality permeate the state," Puri said. "The state is now a sexual domain, it is saturated with biopolitics."

Raji Mohan of Haverford College examined issues of femininity and sexuality in the film The Terrorist, released in 1999. The film follows a young girl, Malli, who is given a suicide mission to assassinate an influential person in the Indian government. The director used the assassination of India's Prime Minister, Rajiv Ghandi, in 1991 as his inspiration, though the film is not meant to be a representation of actual events.

"The film reverses traditional gender roles," Mohan explained. "The main character is deliberately unfeminized." "In [the film], Malli's sexuality is something different and unpredictable, which goes back to the theme of the state's interest in individual sexuality; it turns that [idea] on its head," Schattschneider said.

In the second panel, Keith Vincent of Boston University spoke about gender and sexuality in the Japanese context in terms of literature. "In some sense [the ideas were] written out through narrative, especially in the relationships between male writers who were deeply involved with scholarship and poetry," said Schattschneider.

The third panel provided an opportunity for graduate students to showcase their fieldwork. "We all really wanted to provide a forum in which grad students could provide some of their work and show what kind of things they're finding in the field, which I think we did successfully," Schattschneider said.

All three panels were followed by commentary and discussion.

The symposium was preceded by a tour and discussion of the "Tiger by the Tail!" exhibition in the Rose Art Museum with scholars from the symposium, students and women brought to Brandeis from the Waltham community. The "Tiger by the Tail!" exhibit features work by Indian women artists in a variety of media. The artwork explores Indian culture as it pertains to issues such as feminism and sexuality.

Schattschneider, Singh and Lamb coordinated the event, which was co-sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Program, the Department of Anthropology, the Masters of Arts program in Cultural Production and the Japanese Studies colloquium series.

"A lot of students are interested in seeing a sexuality studies program that really takes not only gay and lesbian studies seriously but also transgender and queer studies seriously," said Prof. Mark Auslander (ANTH). "It's very encouraging to see so much student interest.