This seminar is based on my journal article “Nalini Jameela and the itinerant sex pedagogy of a veshya”.

Nalini Jameela (1954-) is a sex worker and activist from Kerala, India. She is also an autobiographer. Sex workers are treated as the other of ideal Indian womanhood. In regular parlance, the other is known by the term “veshya” (prostitute). Jameela willfully embraces the cultural other. I give details of Jameela’s feminist sex pedagogy, especially of an itinerant kind. Jameela knows for a fact that her male clients always see her as a veshya figure. Their transferences on her are based on the cultural imagination of the veshya. Also, due to constant battering her mirror of the body is not totally predictable and speckle-free. In fact, it remains broken. Via transferences, Jameela’s male clients open up to her. In the process, they learn a good deal about sex, intimacy, and mutuality of pleasure. She offers an alternative worldview about sex to her male clients who are by and large driven by stereotypes and taboo concerning heterosexual intimacy. In psychoanalysis, mirroring or transference signifies non-judgmental listening on the part of the therapist who also reflects back psychological projections of the patients. Although Jameela is not a trained psychotherapist, she deploys them unwittingly. Eventually, she rehabilitates ill-conceived cultural notions concerning veshya figure.

It is part of my thesis chapter. In my thesis I will explore different sex pedagogy cultures. Other chapters include: Fiction and sex pedagogy, Lifestyle pedagogy and sex blogosphere, and Film: Public pedagogy on sex.

Fiction widens the scope of understanding sex workers beyond stereotypical symbols. The sex workers engage in self-learning from their own experiences, by observing fellow sex workers and assessing the mainstream society from their position. My focus is on the sex pedagogies emerging from the fictional space of brothel.

The blogosphere is one most accessible medium of sex pedagogy in present times. In the realm of blogosphere, sex pedagogy is repackaged as lifestyle pedagogies. I will be looking at the lifestyle pedagogies emanating from sex blogosphere.

Films are an important medium of public pedagogy on sex. In this chapter, I will analyze different kinds of labor involved in sex work. I will explore some nuanced aspects of sex pedagogy such as aesthetic labor, affective labor and emotional labor.