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Draws upon multi-disciplinary frameworks of analysis to provide an account of the making of sexual cultures in modern India.
The Sexual History of the Global South explores the gap between sexuality studies and post-colonial cultural critique. Featuring twelve case studies, based on original historical and ethnographic research from countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the book examines the sexual investments underlying the colonial project and the construction of modern nation-states. Covering issues of heteronormativity, post-colonial amnesia regarding non-normative sexualities, women's sexual agency, the policing of the boundaries between the public and the private realm, sexual citizenship, the connections between LGBTQ activism and processes of state formation, and the emergence of sexuality studies in the global South, this collection is of great geographical, historical, and topical significance.
Stereotypes result in deceptive generalizations about groups and are held in a manner that renders them as derogatory. As such, this volume advocates an active, goal-oriented effort in order to reduce prejudice through contact. Deconstructing the motivated ‘otherizing’ of the marginalized, the book offers an alternative reading of the representations of Indian body and desire, in both literature and media, that are often politically inscribed as ‘abnormal’ and ‘unnatural’ due to their non-conformity. Poststructural and postcolonial theories have argued that the body is a cultural construct rather than a natural entity. This argument is based on the assumption that there is no una...
Dinesh C. Sharma is a New Delhi-based award-winning journalist and author with over thirty-five years’ of professional experience. He has written extensively on science and technology, climate change, health, environment and innovation for national and international media, including The Lancet and Wired. He has been Science Editor at Mail Today, and Managing Editor at India Science Wire and is currently the Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (2020-2021). His book The Outsourcer: The Story of India’s IT Revolution was awarded the Computer History Museum Book Prize in 2016. He has also been a visiting faculty at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Ateneo de Manila University, Manila. Dinesh Sharma tweets at @dineshcsharma
This book is a socio-historical analysis of rationalism as a world view – that guides many of our actions in concrete everyday life – and as a philosophy – that guides our epistemological understanding of the reality around us. It explores the multifaceted manifestations of the idea in the Enlightenment philosophy, modern sociological theorising and post-structural standpoints. The volume also critiques rationality from feminist, subaltern and postcolonial perspectives. Finally, it delves into the multi-layered sociological significances of rationalisation of different domains of life. Transdisciplinary in scope and with essays by foremost scholars in the field, this volume will be a major intervention across the humanities and the social sciences. It will be of interest to students and researchers in sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, gender studies, political science, cultural anthropology, education, and religious studies.
This book explores queer potentialities in the tribal folktales of India. It elucidates the queer elements in the oral narratives of four indigenous communities from East and Northeast India, which are found to be significant repositories of gender fluidity and non-normative desires. Departing from the popular understanding that ‘Otherness’ results largely from undue exposure to Western permissiveness, the author reveals how minority sexualities actually have their roots in aboriginal indigenous cultures and do not necessarily constitute a mimicry of the West. The volume endeavours to demystify the politics behind such vindictive propagation to sensitize the queerphobic mainstream about the essential endogenous presence of the queer in the spaces that are aboriginal. Based on extensive interdisciplinary research, this book is a first of its kind in the study of indigenous queer narratives. It will be useful to scholars and researchers of queer studies, gender studies, tribal and indigenous studies, literature, cultural studies, postcolonialism, sociology, political studies and South Asian studies.
Sources and Methods in the History of Sexuality outlines some of the challenges of retracing sexual acts, identities, and desires in the past, and shows how historians have responded to these methodological challenges with ingenuity and creativity. The volume acknowledges that the history of sexuality poses particularly interesting challenges in relation to sources due the peculiar nature of sexuality. On one hand, sexuality is frequently hidden and private, its practices often unknown, denied, and evaded, its desires fleeting or obsessive, its reality confused or illuminated by fantasy; yet on the other, sexuality consistently breaks into the public sphere through moral panics, waves of per...
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the 1990s, India's mediascape saw the efflorescence of edgy soft-porn films in the Malayalam-speaking state of Kerala. In Rated A, Darshana Sreedhar Mini examines the local and transnational influences that shaped Malayalam soft-porn cinema—such as vernacular pulp fiction, illustrated erotic tales, and American exploitation cinema—and maps the genre's circulation among blue-collar workers of the Indian diaspora in the Middle East, where pirated versions circulate alongside low-budget Bangladeshi films and Pakistani muj...
The women in India's great epics compare favourably with the men Draupadi, the princess with five husbands and a fiery temperament; Uloopi, who abducted the mighty warrior Arjuna; Satyabhama, who fought alongside Krishna to kill the demon Narakasura; Sita, who dramatically descended into the bowels of the Earth rather than return to her suspicious husband; Satyavati, whose greed set the stage for the Kurukshetra War; or Savitri, who achieved the impossible without picking up a weapon. Pushpa Kurup brings their stories and many others in this brilliant compilation of the powerful and intriguing women of our mythology. What enriches this volume further is the inclusion of a few lesser-known but equally significant women, such as Unniyarcha, the heroine of the vadakkanpaatu of Malabar; Kannagi, whose fury destroyed the prosperous Pandya kingdom of Madurai; or Sati Devi and Amba, who immolated themselves in their bid to achieve their mission. From bhikkunis and sanyasinis to wild and wayward women, from daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers to queens, warriors and scholars, the stories of these splendid women throw up many surprises and make for a fascinating read.