Gandhi's Tiger and Sita's Smile presents a collection of compelling essays which interrogate a variety of Indian texts and contexts along intersecting axes of gender, nation, and desire. The primary theme that weaves these varied essays together, written at different points of time with varying focal points of interest, is intertextuality. Vanita examines the way in which medieval texts speak to each other and draw on earlier canonical works, rewriting and transforming narrative in a spirit of respectful conversation. She also looks at modern texts, such as nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century fiction and cinema, as they converse with each other and with older texts. In doing so, she tries to explore how such pre-modern and modern texts are received in later periods or by other cultures in the same period. These captivating and intensely thought-provoking writings demonstrate the author's superb ability to turn the norm, whether Right-wing or Left-Wing, on its head, and find a fresh way to appreciate diversity and change, and the valuable dialogue they give rise to.

The constructed “naturalness” of a world made up of two sexes, two genders, and heterosexual desire as the only legitimate desire has been continuously questioned and challenged by those marginalised by these norms. This forces us to ask some important questions: How is gender really understood and constructed in the world that we inhabit? How does it operate through the various socio-political-cultural structures around us? And, most crucially, how is it lived? No Outlaws in the Gender Galaxy answers these questions with a research study that attempts to understand gender through the lives of queer persons assigned gender female at birth. The lived realities of the respondents, echoing in the book through their voices, help to interrogate gender as well as provide clues to how it can be envisioned or revisioned to be egalitarian. This book explores how gender plays out in public and private institutions like the family, educational institutions, work and public spaces. Looking at each of these independently, it elaborates the specific ways in which binary gender norms are woven into each arena and it also explores the multiple ways in which interlocking systems of heteronormativity, casteism, class and ableism are enmeshed within patriarchy to create exclusion, marginalisation, pathologisation and violence. This book illustrates the multiplicity of ways in which people live gender and testifies that even if there are gender laws, in a just world there can be no gender outlaws. Published by Zubaan.

In Psychoanalysis from the Indian Terroir, Manasi Kumar, Anup Dhar, and Anurag Mishra discuss the synergies and diachronic thought that is emblematic of the current psychoanalytic narrative in India and examine what psychoanalysis in India could become. The contributors to this edited collection connect problems around culture, family, traditions, and the burgeoning political changes in the Indian landscape in order to provide critical rejoinders to the maternal-feminine thematic in India’s cultural psyche. Specifically, the contributors examine issues surrounding ethnic violence, therapists’ gender and political identities, narratives of illness, and spiritual and traditional approaches to healing.

This book is one of the first systematic examinations on the looming mental health crisis emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic from a psychoanalytic perspective. Bringing together practising therapists from Asia and Europe, this book: analyses themes like anxiety, depression, sexuality, loss and death through clinical vignettes highlights how children, adolescents and adults have been responding to the pandemic explores how personal and collective trauma are mourned, remembered, repeated and worked through studies deep-seated prejudices and fears focuses on how the pandemic has stimulated exceptional manifestations of human solidarity and creativity Comprehensive and practical, this book will be an essential guide for mental health professionals, counsellors, therapists and medical doctors treating psychological trauma.

Few issues today cause more public - and private - debate than the interaction of homosexuality and religion. From the question of gay marriage to the place of gays and lesbians within faith communities, religious leaders and lay members must deal with these issues for now and for years to come. What is the historical position of the major denominations? How are people of faith balancing their beliefs? This encyclopedia provides an overview of the various attitudes and responses that religions have had to the presence of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons within their communities. This is the most comprehensive volume to date on the intersections between religion and homosexuality.

The stories in the Grimm brothers' Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), first published in 1812 and 1815, have come to define academic and popular understandings of the fairy tale genre. Yet over a period of forty years, the brothers, especially Wilhelm, revised, edited, sanitized, and bowdlerized the tales, publishing the seventh and final edition in 1857 with many of the sexual implications removed. However, the contributors in Transgressive Tales: Queering the Grimms demonstrate that the Grimms and other collectors paid less attention to ridding the tales of non-heterosexual implications and that, in fact, the Grimms' tales are rich with queer possibilities. Editors Kay Turner and Pauline Greenhill introduce the volume with an overview of the tales' literary and interpretive history, surveying their queerness in terms of not just sex, gender and sexuality, but also issues of marginalization, oddity, and not fitting into society. In three thematic sections, contributors then consider a range of tales and their queer themes. In Faux Femininities, essays explore female characters, and their relationships and feminine representation in the tales. Contributors to Revising Rewritings consider queer elements in rewritings of the Grimms' tales, including Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Jeanette Winterson's Twelve Dancing Princesses, and contemporary reinterpretations of both "Snow White" and "Snow White and Rose Red." Contributors in the final section, Queering the Tales, consider queer elements in some of the Grimms' original tales and explore intriguing issues of gender, biology, patriarchy, and transgression. With the variety of unique perspectives in Transgressive Tales, readers will find new appreciation for the lasting power of the fairy-tale genre. Scholars of fairy-tale studies and gender and sexuality studies will enjoy this thought-provoking volume.

Life Writings/Narratives and studies in gender have been posing critical challenges to fetishizing the manner of canon formations and curriculum propriety. This book engages with these and other challenges turning our customary gaze towards women especially marginal, enabling us to interrogate the established pedagogical practices that accentuates the continuing denial of their agency. Reproduction of the cultural modes of narrativization based on memory and experience becomes a mode of reclaiming the agency. These challenge the homogenising singularity of communitarian notions besides dominant gender constructs using visual, textual, popular, historical, cultural and gender modes enabling one to rethink our received theoretical frameworks. This edited volume brings together 21 essays on life writings produced by both well-established and emerging writers in the field of literature written by scholars from countries like India, Pakistan, China, USA, Iran, Yemen and Australia, to name just a few. Many of the essays in this book focus on how the progress of the self is often impeded by the society it finds itself in. With an enlightening foreword by Dr. E.V. Ramakrishnan and a detailed, critical introduction by Aparna Lanjewar Bose, this anthology is useful for all those who wish to learn more about this genre of writing.

This book shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explores the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling. Bhakta poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Rahim and Raidas drew on ideas and characters from the epics to present a vision of oneness. Justice is indivisible, all bodies are made of the same matter, all beings suffer, and all consciousnesses are akin. This book makes the radical argument that in the epics, kindness to animals, the dharma available to all, is inseparable from all other forms of dharma.

The topic of sexuality and gender within the South Asian context is timely and widely discussed across a variety of academic disciplines. Since the end of the last century, there have been debates in the cultural sphere in India on issues concerning Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender people’s rights, gender, sex workers’ rights and caste. There has also been an explicit visibility for sexuality in the form of discussion around intimate scenes in films, advertisements and moral concerns around pre-marital heterosexual relationships and same-sex relationships. This book brings out the modalities through which explicit visibility of sexuality gets constituted in the public space of India after the 1990s. The specificities through which relations of gender/ sexuality and caste get constituted and performed in regional media provide significant entry points to an understanding of larger structures and the ever-present fissures through which these larger structures emerge. Focussing on the southern state of Kerala, the book investigates women’s sexuality and caste through a number of case studies: the Suryanelli rape case, neology in the media and the debates around the life narratives of Nalini Jameela, a sex worker. The book does not stop at representational practices as it also looks at the negotiations between the subject and her represented figures which is a significant addition to the existing body of work in the field of media and gender studies. Sexuality and Public Space in India is a careful interrogation of the mass-mediatized space of contemporary public discourse around sexuality. It will be of interest to academics in South Asian Studies, Sociology, Anthropology and Gender Studies.

This handbook offers an analysis of Asian diaspora and development, and explores the role that immigrants living within diasporic and transnational communities play in the development of their host countries and their homeland. Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary scholars from across the world, the handbook is divided into the following sections: • Development Potential of Asian Diasporas • Diaspora, Homeland, and Development • Gender, Generation, and Identities • Soft Power, Mobilization, and Development • Media, Culture, and Representations. Presenting cutting-edge research on several dimensions of diaspora and development, Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora and Development provides a platform for further discussion in the fields of migration studies, diaspora studies, transnational studies, race relations, ethnic studies, gender studies, globalization, Asian studies, and research methods.