The Sexuality of the Uncontacted on a Video Tape

Panisson, Benedetta

Abstract

My PhD research (Durham University) focuses on visual productions in relation to sexualities in insular territories. Since the late nineteenth century, ethnography, photography, and then video, have structured a visual exploitation of what in the eyes of Western explorers was considered hostile, perverse, and nudity to be tamed, creating imaginaries, erotic exoticism, and data deemed scientific. A form of study aimed at creating sexual peripheralities in territorial peripheralities, such as oceanic islands. What culture and morality assimilates hostility with sexuality? In particular, a footage recorded in 1998 at North Sentinel (Andaman Islands), and analyzed by Vishvajit Pandya (2009), whose natives are still coonsidered as uncontacted, and preserved by Indian authorities as such, but spotted by British settlers, then anthropologists, and finally illegal tourism, shows one of the few approaches to the island. Coconuts are thrown from the boat, some natives pick them up, others perform sexual gestures considered by Indian authorities to be obscene, and a way of defending themselves. A critical question arises here: in 1998 how can the North Sentinel indigenous people, deemed unaltered by Western and Central Indian sexual-related cultures and morals, perform purposefully hostile sexual gestures? Here It is analized the notion of sexual diversity in those who study native peoples in oceanic islands, with the aim of defusing the hostility-sexuality pair.

Citation

Panisson, B. (2022). The Sexuality of the Uncontacted on a Video Tape. [https://youtu.be/aNRRlkBxhzY?si=Ha6MjOkd1a6nIJ7Q]

• Digital Artefact Type: Website Content
• Acceptance Date: Jul 1, 2022
• Publication Date: 2022-09
• Deposit Date: May 6, 2024
• Keywords: visual studies; islandss; indigenous studies; sexual studies; queer studies
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2433503