The Gendered Body in South Asia : Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle

This book situates the discourse on the gendered body within the rapidly transitioning South Asian socio-economic and cultural landscape. It critically analyzes gender politics from different disciplinary perspectives including psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, post-colonialism and law among others. Enriched by contributions from well-known South Asian feminist scholars, this book discusses themes such as democracy and dissent, citizenship and violence and how the female body has historically been used in these discussions as a shield and a weapon. It also focuses on technology and misogyny, the politics of veiling and unveiling, the body of the Muslim women in contemporary India as well as bodies which are marginalized or labelled transgressive or monstrous. The chapters in the volume showcase the complexities, convergences and divergences which exist in the conception and understanding of the gendered body, sexuality and gender roles in different socio-cultural spaces in South Asia and how women negotiate these boundaries. Topical and comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gender studies, sociology, political sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial studies and South Asian studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Part I Negotiation Chapter 1 Wearing Multiple Bodies: Towards a Psychosocial Analysis of Women’s Bodies in Globalizing India Chapter 2 Mothering the Daughters’ Body: Narratives from Two Muslim Mothers in India Chapter 3 Conversations on the COVID-19 Pandemic: Body, Violence and Touch Part II Struggle Chapter 4 The Politics of Un/Covering in India Chapter 5 New Technologies and Gender: Reproducing Bodies, Resisting Bodies Chapter 6 Bodily Integrity and Politics of Tradition Chapter 7 My Honor, My Crime Chapter 8 Ghosts in Search of Bodies Part III Resistance Chapter 9 “Inside Girls”: Transgressing the Hudd in Pakistani Feminist Poetry Chapter 10 The Yakshi as the Monstrous Feminine: Some Representations from the Malayalam-Speaking Region Chapter 11 The Marginalised Tribal Body in Mahashweta Devi’s Stories Chapter 12 The Body in Submission: An Offering to Feminism Part IV Protest Chapter 13 Voicing Democracy and Reclaiming Citizenship: A Dialogic Conversation about Shaheen Bagh Chapter 14 Campus Feminism and the Nation-State: Women Students’ Leadership of the Anti-CAA-NRC Uprising in India Chapter 15 Rizia Rahman’s Rokter Okshor: Politics of Prostitution and the Consciousness of Civic Society in Bangladesh Part V Critique Chapter 16 Disabled Bodies, Pain, and the Question of Vulnerability Chapter 17 Binarised Bodies: Towards a Politics of Inarticulacy, Instability, and Anonymity Chapter 18 “Knees & Feet Together, Shoulders Back and Chest Out”1: Embodying the Hidden Curriculum through Women’s Girlhood Narratives Part VI Representations and New Directions Chapter 19 “Fragments of Memory”: The Thoa Khalsa Incident of 1947 in the Amritsar Partition Museum Chapter 20 Not an Island unto Themselves but a Part of the Main: Women Voices from the Sri Lankan Conflict Chapter 21 Mother Only You: Violence, Expulsion, Longing Chapter 22 Affirmative Multiplicities: Towards an Anthropocene Theory of Corporeality Index This book situates the discourse on the gendered body within the rapidly transitioning South Asian socio-economic and cultural landscape. It critically analyses gender politics from different disciplinary perspectives including psychoanalysis, post structuralism, post colonialism and law among others.