Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality

by Puri,Jyoti

• ISBN13: 9780415921275
• ISBN10: 0415921279
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781135962654
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-06-24
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Jyoti Puri draws on post-colonial and feminist theory to focus on how women in current-day India conceptualize their gender and sexuality. She provides a groundbreaking ethnographic study based on fifty-four middle- and upper-class Indian women, ranging from the ages of fifteen to thirty-eight. She argues that these women's narratives are shaped by not only the nation-state, but by transnational processes as well. Woman, Body and Desire in Postcolonial Indiaconnects important issues of class an nationhood to the emerging sense of female identity in India, covering previously neglected topics such as menstruation, gay and straight sexual experience, sexual harassment and assault, marriage and motherhood. Puri discovers that attitudes about sexuality and gender are surprisingly similar in India and Western countries.

Author Biography

Jyoti Puri is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Simmons College, Boston.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xiii
Fictions of Identity	1	(24)
Sex, Sexuality, and the Nation-State	25	(18)
Docile and Disruptive	43	(32)
Narratives on Menarche and Menstruation
Tensions of Sexual Respectability	75	(28)
Accounts of Sexual Aggression
Negotiating the Norm	103	(32)
Speaking of Heterosexual Desire
Rethinking the Requirements	135	(36)
Of Marriage and Motherhood
Hybrid and Hyphenated	171	(26)
Reading Queer Narratives
Conclusion	197	(12)
Considering New Courses or Stoking Fire
Notes	209	(16)
Index	225