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2008
In attempting to explore the idea of nudity as excess, and of nudity as a language of resistance, I read two incidents and examine the narratives of two literary figures: the Chandragutti nude procession in 1986 and the Manipur nude protest in 2004, the thirteenth century Bhakti poet and saint Akkamahadevi and Mahasweta Devi’s fictional character Dopdi. In the four instances that I bring together in this essay, I look at how the women in these incidents use their bodies in a performance of nudity in particular ritualized and performative ways to express a location and a position that does not seem comprehensible or communicable. Though I do not explore it in detail, I also hint at the possible connections between the excess of nudity and the excess of madness that is displayed by various female characters on stage.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Spring
"Are you a man?": Performing Naked Protest in India2011 •
This article examines the feminist potential and political risks of a theatrical mode of protest staged by women in India, namely, the deliberate and public exposure of naked female bodies as a gesture of defiance against the violence of the Indian state. I examine literary, theatrical, documentary, and political representations of such naked protests in India, tracing how they draw from and reconstitute a wider cultural repertoire around women’s nakedness that shapes their meaning and impact as critiques of patriarchal violence. I also consider the gendered logics through which each of them attempts to rescript the patriarchal terms underwriting the violence of the state. I argue that naked protest does deviate from the hegemonic norms of feminine shame that render women violable—yet in particular framings, the gesture also risks reinscribing a chivalrous ideal of masculinity in ways that should give feminists some pause. I conclude that the eventual success of naked protests as a viable mode of women’s protest in India should be gauged not only in terms of their immediate reception and outcome but also in terms of the gendered scripts that they rewrite or reinforce. Moving away from a false dichotomy of protective or dominative masculinity implicit in some of these protests, I conclude that an ongoing deconstruction of the gender binary is integral to any feminist critique of violence.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities
Resisting Sexual Colonization, Reclaiming Denied Spaces: A Reading of 'Tattooed with Taboos: An Anthology of Poetry by Three Women from Northeast India'In the pervasiveness of the dominant male voices in literature, the resistant female voices have traditionally got drowned. This has made the act of identification and foregrounding of the works of women an important political act, enabling women to gain agency by focusing attention on the silences and taboos on their bodies, sexualities, desires and pleasures thereby disrupting the hegemonic patriarchal establishment. It is in this context that this paper attempts to make a reading of 'Tattooed with Taboos: An Anthology of Poetry by Three Women from Northeast India', a collection of seventy-seven poems which tries to understand what it means to be a woman in a society fettered with the shackles of patriarchy. The resistance in the anthology (first published in 2011), complied by poets who hail from a peripheral province in the Indian nation-state, begins with the cover design, which powerfully foregrounds a picture of the hem of a 'phanek' (a traditional sarong-like dress worn by women in Manipur), which, because of the norm created by the social matrix of the patriarchal Manipuri society, is regarded as inauspicious and untouchable for the menfolk because of its association with the body of the woman. The paper endeavours to explore how the picture of a vilified piece of dress, symbolising the social control of women's bodies, becomes in the hands of these women poets potent cultural capital as they go about resisting in/through their poetry the sexual colonisation of their bodies and the smothering of their desires by a patriarchal society. In this context, the paper attempts to look at how the poets in this anthology try to re-historicise the pain, sufferings and trauma inscribed on the 'abject' bodies of women by questioning the existing discourse and trying to find a new way of viewing/writing their bodies. This endeavour on the part of the poets, as this paper tries to show, leads them to express a desire to trespass into spaces usually denied to women in the personal and the public.
Contemporary India, (Journal of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi), 2002
Review of Charu Gupta's 'Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001)2002 •
2018 •
International Journal of Advance and Applied Research
Unveiling Social Hypocrisies, and Voicing Feminine Sensuality: Ismat Chugtai’s Lifting the Veil (Dr. Avinash L. Pandhare)2022 •
Ismat Chughtai, a courageous and brilliant feminist writer, has been vocal about physical desires of women suppressed due to customs of orthodox society. She, through her writings, especially through her short stories, has talked about things related with female sexuality – things that are considered taboo in the society even today. Chughtai has exhibited great courage while expressing female sexuality, lesbianism and homosexuality openly and audaciously in her short stories. This article attempts to bring forth how Ismat Chughtai has written about feminine sensuality tearing apart the hypocrisies of orthodox society. Keywords: Feminism; Feminine Sensuality; Sexuality; Homo eroticism; Lesbianism; Feminine Sexual Repression
Hawaiian Journal of History Volume 55
Special Rights of Citizenship and the Perpetuation of Oligarchic Rule in the Republic of Hawaiʻi, 1894-18982021 •
2024 •
2020 •
2023 •
Journal of World Sociopolitical Studies
The Jewish Community in Contemporary Iran: A New Analytic ApproachJournal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities
Self‐concept research with school‐aged youth with intellectual disabilities: A systematic review2018 •
Mathematische Annalen
Tilting on non-commutative rational projective curves2010 •
Journal of Physics: Conference Series
A study on relative humidity sensors using PVA and PMMA coating2019 •
International Journal of Agricultural Invention
Pathogenecity of Metarhizium anisopliae on Helicoverpa armigera larvae instars2020 •
2019 •