This book introduces experiential knowledge of the intersectionality of disability, sexuality, and gender equality issues. Scholars and disabled persons’ organizations in different Asian countries such as China, Vietnam, Myanmar, Nepal, and Japan have contributed to the book. It is a preliminary introduction of the frontline practice of Asian disability activism and the experience of women and LGBTIQ people with disabilities. It presents the direct participation of disability advocates in mapping how both women with disabilities and LGBTIQ individuals with disabilities realize their rights such as identity, work rights, personal safety, and sexual rights. Studies presented here explore the experience of empowering diverse disability groups and advocating for equality and non-discrimination. It explains how to use the leverage of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) for further human rights campaigns in a broader context for disadvantaged groups. This collection is the product of a participatory research project, which aims to increase the capabilities of local disabled persons’ organizations and NGOs in utilizing human rights laws and encourage dialogue and collaboration between academia, people with disabilities, and human rights advocates. It will be essential reading for academics, researchers, policy-makers, and campaign groups.

Sex, Desire, and Taboo in South Asia: Religion, Culture of Ability, and Patriarchy explores the intersection of religion, culture of ability, and patriarchy in relation to sex, desire, and taboo. Divided into six chapters, this book utilizes Western theorists such as Foucault and Freud in conjunction with Spivak’s theory of the subaltern to establish a theoretical context on sexuality. Through this lens, Acharya evaluates the intersection between religion, patriarchy, and gender and their impact on the perception of sex and desire as a taboo within a South Asian context. The book also examines how individuals contend with their sexual desires, using literature and social media to display the stark difference between the cultural promotion of antisexualism and existing ancient texts on the art of erotica, such as the Kamasutra. In doing so, Sex, Desire, and Taboo in South Asia expands on Eurocentric notions of sexuality and addresses the conditions of the subaltern to explore the complex dynamics of sex in South Asia.

This book presents a new approach to the understanding of non-normative sexuality and gender transgressive modes in South Asia and South Asian diaspora. It reconceives sexual representation from the point of view of the theoretical, political and empirical trajectories of decolonization, provincialization and neoliberalism to look at the role of historical contingency, postcolonial sexual politics and gender and sexual diversity. The volume brings together anthropological, historical, material and political analyses around South Asian sexual politics by exploring a range of themes, including culture, class, ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, migration, borders, diaspora, modernity and cosmopolitanism across various local, regional and global contexts. By using southern/non-Western and subaltern theorizations of gender and sexuality, the book discusses South Asian sexualities through issues such as the sexual politics of indeterminacy; sexual subculture, iconography and political decision-making; religious identity; queer South Asian diaspora; decolonizing the postcolonial body; sexual politics, gender and feminist debates; discrimination, and socio-political violence; the political economy of empowerment; and critical appropriation of the 377 Indian Penal Code. It also builds forms of dialogues to bridge the gap between academic and development practitioners. With diverse case studies and a fresh theoretical framework, this book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of South Asian studies, gender studies, sexuality studies, sociology and social anthropology, political studies, diaspora studies, postcolonial and global south studies.

Family, Body, Sexuality and Health is Volume III of the Encyclopedia of Women & Islamic Cultures. In almost 200 well written entries it covers the broad field of family, body, sexuality and health and Islamic cultures.

This book offers a nuanced way to conceptualise South Asian Muslim families’ experiences of disability within the UK. The book adopts an intersectional lens to engage with personal narratives on mothering disabled children, negotiating home-school relationships, and developing familiarity with the complex special education system. The author calls for a re-envisioning of special education and disability studies literature from its currently overwhelmingly White middle-class discourse, to one that espouses multi-ethnic and multi-faith perspectives. The book positions minoritised mothers at the forefront of the home-school relationship, who navigate the UK special education system amidst intersecting social inequalities. The author proposes that schools and both formal and informal institutions reformulate their roles in facilitating true inclusion for minoritised disabled families at an epistemic and systemic level.

This book on the future of Asian feminisms, confronting fundamentalisms, conflicts, and neo-liberalism is a critical contribution to the rising voices of Asian women’s studies scholars and activists. It is based on the ongoing research and advocacy work of the Kartini Asia Network, founded in 2003 in Manila. The five overlapping themes of the network are women/gender studies, fundamentalisms, conflicts, livelihood and sexuality. Considering that the economic and political weight of the region is growing fast, and that the 21st century has been named the “Asian century,” Asia is increasingly recognised as the continent to which economic, if not political power, will shift in the coming decades. The chapters brought together in this volume demonstrate the great diversity of the “transversal cultural flow” that women’s movements within Asia provide. Members of the Kartini network stimulate the articulation of a particular “Asian voice” in women’s studies and in the global women’s movement. Considering the existing patriarchal structures all over the continent, a continuum of oppressions enfolds, from the global sphere of market exchange to emerging fundamentalisms and to bitter conflicts and struggles around sexualities. The present volume provides elements for the critical dialogues that are needed between women in the region, between women and men, between people in all sorts of strategic positions, and between theoreticians in the Global South and the Global North to create a world in which human dignity is not eroded by predatory economic processes and in which democracy, diversity, pluralism, and inclusivity are the guiding principles of governance.

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.

Introduces key terms, research frameworks, debates, and histories for Asian American Studies Born out of the Civil Rights and Third World Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian American Studies has grown significantly over the past four decades, both as a distinct field of inquiry and as a potent site of critique. Characterized by transnational, trans-Pacific, and trans-hemispheric considerations of race, ethnicity, migration, immigration, gender, sexuality, and class, this multidisciplinary field engages with a set of concepts profoundly shaped by past and present histories of racialization and social formation. The keywords included in this collection are central to social sciences, humanities, and cultural studies and reflect the ways in which Asian American Studies has transformed scholarly discourses, research agendas, and pedagogical frameworks. Spanning multiple histories, numerous migrations, and diverse populations, Keywords for Asian American Studies reconsiders and recalibrates the ever-shifting borders of Asian American studies as a distinctly interdisciplinary field. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.

This book paints a vivid picture of women's active involvement in reshaping intimate and public sexual life in East Asia. In bringing together exciting new feminist research on sexuality from East Asia and making it available to a wider audience, East Asian Sexualities unsettles stereotypes, rectifies lack of awareness and demonstrates that East Asia matters. The chapters address the diversity and variety of everyday sexual lives and sexual politics in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. They range from workplace sexual cultures, trans-national sexual relations, the conditions of sex-work and the emergence of new sexual desires, cultures and movements. The contributors highlight the gendered and sexual consequences of globalization and rapid social change. In doing so, they engage with western debates on late modernity while also exploring the contested understandings of modernization and westernization in the East. This is a collection which illuminates the local situations in which women's sexual lives are lived and offers fresh perspectives on global issues.