Sex, Desire, and Taboo in South Asia: Religion, Culture of Ability, and Patriarchy explores the intersection of religion, culture of ability, and patriarchy in relation to sex, desire, and taboo. Divided into six chapters, this book utilizes Western theorists such as Foucault and Freud in conjunction with Spivak’s theory of the subaltern to establish a theoretical context on sexuality. Through this lens, Acharya evaluates the intersection between religion, patriarchy, and gender and their impact on the perception of sex and desire as a taboo within a South Asian context. The book also examines how individuals contend with their sexual desires, using literature and social media to display the stark difference between the cultural promotion of antisexualism and existing ancient texts on the art of erotica, such as the Kamasutra. In doing so, Sex, Desire, and Taboo in South Asia expands on Eurocentric notions of sexuality and addresses the conditions of the subaltern to explore the complex dynamics of sex in South Asia.

Be warned! This book contains descriptions of practices which might be considered as horrid or shocking to most in the Western world. The extensive case histories and rituals expose what is perhaps the most unspeakable (and, for its practitioners, unspoken) taboo of the Western psyche: the union of sex and religion. A must-have for those interested in Sex Magick, Chaos Magick, Thelema, and the Golden Dawn.

All study of the origins of social institutions must be based on what ethnology can tell us of the psychology of the lower races and on the primitive conceptions of human relations which are thus established. It is only in early modes of thought that we can find the explanation of ceremonies and systems which originated in primitive society; and, if ceremony and system are the concrete forms in which human relations are expressed, an examination, ethnological and psychological, of human relations, is indispensable for enquiry into human institutions.

In this book, Marvin Leiner analyzes the practice of quarantine in the context of the Cuban Revolution. He also focuses on efforts by Cuban educators to introduce sex education in the schools and to change sexist and homophobic attitudes, discussing their successes and failures with candor and examining the explicit and implicit linkages between machismo and homophobia.