((( FORUM Queer Forum on Navigating Normativity Between Field and Academe in India Itinerant Sex Anjali Arondekar Copyright © 2018 Michigan State University. Anjali Arondekar, “Itinerant Sex,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 5.3 (2018): 148–152. ISSN 2327-1574. All rights reserved. I have just four very broad comments to make. I’ve ambitiously called my com- ments “Itinerant Sex,” and I’ll say why in a minute. First, I want to situate my remarks within the current controversy/political debates around sexual harass- ment that are happening not just with Harvey Weinstein, but of course within the feld of South Asian studies. I know many of you are well aware of what I am invoking here. I’m not interested in rehashing the gory details of what transpired or what will transpire, in the aftermath of the reportage and social media expo- sure of South Asian male academics accused of sexual harassment. I do, however, want to speak directly to our local contexts, because some of us—Mrinalini Sinha, myself, Indrani Chatterjee, Raka Ray, and Priti Ramamurthy—about three years ago, worked with Lalita and several other people to institute a pol- icy around sexual harassment at the conference, because we had encountered several similar complaints, situations, and we wanted to develop some language to speak to that problem. And what we foregrounded then––and what I talked about last year at a large gathering on sexual harassment––is that we need to theorize sexual harassment within the context of area studies and within the context of feminist theory. Tat is, why does area studies (particularly if the “area” in question is in the Global South, and in our case, South Asia), inev- itably get produced alongside questions of sexuality in some errant or itinerant form, a form that doesn’t conform to our sense of how we think of the idea of geopolitics and/or area. So, the fact that the letter in Hufngton Post accusing a senior scholar in South Asian studies, and the complainant in the infamous Farooqui episode in Delhi, were both white feminist scholars working on South Asia is something we need to engage with, and think through carefully, beyond simple nativist indignation. This work originally appeared in QED, 5.3, Fall 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.