'Living Sexualities' beyond the Heteronormative Matrix: exploring gender, class and sexualities in urban middle class Bangladesh

‘Living sexualities’ indicates the possibility and existences of multiple sexualities that are either desired and/or practiced by men and women within the spaces of their middle class social arrangements at different stages of lives, and multiplicity of sexualities that challenge a dominant heteronormative socio-sexual structure. Taking  two central elements of the heteronormative matrix of the Bangladeshi middle class society and culture, i.e. marriage normativity and homosociality- I look into the ways in which non-normative lives of  Gay men, Women in/interested in same sex relations, and Single straight women are negotiated. It argues that lives are lived beyond and outside the hetero-patriarchal matrix, and there are spaces and scopes for ambiguity, plural identities and varied performances of gender and sexualities.

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Roy Huijsmans