Women S Sexuality And Modern India

Between the first and second decade of the millennium, women across the world reconsidered the sexual roles they had been playing under patriarchy. The 2012 protests in India triggered some of this global change, ushering Indians squarely into the desired yet uncomfortable " third wave" feminism which demands the recognition of women as sexual subjects. Beginning from the premise that each country is in a unique relationship to patriarchy, Women's Sexuality in India: In a Rapture of Distress offers pictures of how individual Indian women locate their sexuality amidst the fantasies of Indian patriarchy, and of world culture that imagine their sexuality for them. Built from a data set of upper-middle class women, the book opens up a number of provocative questions. How is dismantling the patriarchy in the imagination different from fighting patriarchy in the outer world? What aspects of sex under patriarchy do women want to give up, and what would they like to keep? What conflicts unfold when daughters welcome as "sexual liberation" ideas that their mothers believed had "come from the west", a west that has been, until fairly recently, a hated colonial oppressor? How did the control of upper-middle class women's sexuality serve as an anchor for collective anxieties about the inherent instability of gender and sexuality? What is the nature of the spectator effect when post-sexual revolution countries listen to the sexuality narratives of countries like India that have not had a sexual revolution?

The essays in this volume develop an understanding of the institutions, practices and forms of representation of Indian sexual relations and their boundaries of legitimacy.

"During the colonial period, Indian intellectuals--philologists, lawyers, scientists and literary figures--all sought to hold a mirror to their country. Whether they wrote novels, polemics, or scientific treatises, all sought a better understanding of society in general and their society in particular. Curiously, female sexuality and sexual behavior play an outside role in their writing. The figure of the prostitute is ubiquitous in everything from medical texts and treatises on racial evolution to anti-Muslim polemic and studies of ancient India. In this book, Durba Mitra argues that between the 1840s and the 1940s, the new science of sexuality became foundational to the scientific study of Indian social progress. The colonial state and an emerging set of Bengali male intellectuals extended the regulation of sexuality to far-reaching projects that sought to define what society should look like and how modern citizens should behave. An exploration of this history of social scientific thought offers new perspectives to understand the power of paternalistic and deeply violent claims about sexual norms in the postcolonial world today. These histories reveal the enduring authority of scientific claims to a tradition that equates social good with the control of women's free will and desire. Thus, they managed to dramatically reorganize their society around upper-caste Hindu ideals of strict monogamy"--

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

How British authorities and Indian intellectuals developed ideas about deviant female sexuality to control and organize modern society in India During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. In Indian Sex Life, Durba Mitra shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. Bringing together vast archival materials from diverse disciplines, Mitra reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. Mitra demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, Indian Sex Life overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

Gender in Modern India brings together pioneering research on a range of themes including social reforms, caste, and contestations; Adivasis, patriarchy, and colonialism; capitalism, political economy, and labour; masculinity and sexuality; health, medical care, and institution building; culture and identity; and migration and its new dynamics. Commissioned in remembrance of the prolific social historian Biswamoy Pati, this volume examines the gender question through a multilayered and multi-dimensional frame in which interdisciplinarity and intersectionality play an important role. Using case studies on gender from diverse geographies?east, west, north, south, and northeast; community locations?Hindu, Muslim, and Christian; and marginalized socio-economic or ethnic habitations such as those of Dalits and Adivasis, the contributors highlight the complexities and diversities of women's negotiations of patriarchies in varied social, ethnic, and community contexts. Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus on three related and overlapping settings?colonial, colonial and postcolonial continuum, and postcolonial. They delineate the multiple lives of gender by focusing on its intersections with other markers of difference including race, class, caste, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, region, and occupation, thereby questioning stereotypes, challenging dated notions and interpretations of gender, and demonstrating the ubiquity of patriarchy.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Theology - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3, Muhlenberg College, course: The Feminine in South Asia, language: English, abstract: In Hinduism the role of females is strictly defined and tied closely to the almost live lasting goal of childbearing. In the ancient texts the Ramayana, the Puranas, and the Mahabharata, female characters function as role models of feminine behavior and their expectations towards motherhood are displayed in the Indian society again today. This essay discusses how the ancient values made their way back in today’s Indian society and reveals the controversy that development accumulates.

While sexual violence is an area that is well mapped by feminist scholarship, this volume focuses on transgresive and marginalised sexualities. It brings together writings on India that highlight the transgression of norms-of heterosexuality. Of geminist and mascline behaviour, of recognisably gendered bodies-that declare ungovermed desire to be illegitinate. Sexualities also includes a selection of campaign documents from diverse sexuality movements in the country.