Some notes on negotiations around sexuality and consumption practices among young women of Delhi

This paper examines the construction of female sexual desire in contemporary Indian advertising with a special emphasis on how young women of Delhi negotiate with issues in and around sexuality and consumption practices. Through ethnographic accounts and critical discourse analysis of advertisements this study goes on to address the issues of pleasure and desire in women’s lives: how women negotiate with questions of sexuality, morality, desire and pleasure. The author argues for a continuing engagement with issues of women’s sexuality even if they are situated within the discourses of consumerism. This suggests that we need to complicate our understanding of choice and agency especially with reference to articulation of sexual desire and pleasure. This paper will finally argue that we need to widen our lens and take into consideration that sexual desire is culturally produced in our visual culture in order to understand the complex relationships between women, their choices and the production of sexual visual content.