Chetana Sabnis

Chetana Sabnis is a graduate student at the Political Science Department. She’s interested in understanding politics through the experiences of various intimate relations: parent-child relations, marital relations, social relations, and so on. She studies these topics using an interdisciplinary comparative historical approach. Her dissertation project studies how experiences in various sexual relations (e.g. sexual relations within marriage, inter-faith sexual relations, same-sex relations, masturbation, etc.) is shaped by state regulation. She argues that these regulations broadly reflect how the state valorizes certain traits of masculinity and femininity. To develop this theory, she focuses on her home city, Bangalore, India, across the twentieth century, while also drawing on insights and evidence of sexual regulation in various contexts, ranging from the US today to the Ottoman Empire in the 1300s.