Gandhi’s brahmacharya experiments treated women as interchangeable physical specimens

Evidence

For Gandhi to extrapolate from the ‘results’ of sleeping with two (or three, or four) women that he had, or had not, conquered heterosexual desire suggests that he viewed women not as individuals, but as a category. That, for him, a very small sample of a few physical specimens, including his own grand-niece, could stand in for the whole species. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 236

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: how the same categorical, specimen-like logic that lets a reformer treat individuals of another group as ‘the whole species’ shows up across Gandhi’s Untouchability projects — a single logic connecting his treatment of women and of Dalits.