Download or read book Impersonations written by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Impersonations: The Artifice of Brahmin Masculinity in South Indian Dance centers on an insular community of Smarta Brahmin men from the Kuchipudi village in Telugu-speaking South India who are required to don stri-vesam (woman’s guise) and impersonate female characters from Hindu religious narratives. Impersonation is not simply a gender performance circumscribed to the Kuchipudi stage, but a practice of power that enables the construction of hegemonic Brahmin masculinity in everyday village life. However, the power of the Brahmin male body in stri-vesam is highly contingent, particularly on account of the expansion of Kuchipudi in the latter half of the twentieth century from a localized village performance to a transnational Indian dance form. This book analyzes the practice of impersonation across a series of boundaries—village to urban, Brahmin to non-Brahmin, hegemonic to non-normative—to explore the artifice of Brahmin masculinity in contemporary South Indian dance.
Download or read book Androgyny and Female Impersonation in India written by Tutun Mukherjee and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -A cross-cultural exploration of one of the most fascinating subjects to be questioned and criticized in the twenty-first century: the gender binary -This book accesses what many westerners believe to be a modern preoccupation, through the lens of India's historically and culturally significant 'third gender' Androgyny is an engaging subject of discussion and research in present times. This volume makes an effort to understand concepts of androgyny and 'nari bhav', or sensibility of the feminine beyond the anatomy-directed definitions, which are loosened by the nebulous realm of the third sex, or third gender. Various literary and performative traditions in India emphasize the interrelatedness of art and society. They suggest that the concept of 'nari bhav' comes from a deeply rooted cultural belief in the fluidity of female and male (symbolized, for example, by deities like Ardhanariswara). This belief, that the constant interplay of duality engenders balance and harmony in both personal and social aspects of human life, forms the basis of female impersonation in India, alongside the acknowledgment of the existence of male and female physiological and/or emotional-psychological tendencies within each individual. Such perception urges more inclusiveness in social attitudes, and easier acceptance of different sexualities and ways of expressing gender. This volume discusses concepts of androgyny that permeate the Indian cultural ethos, which are expressed through female impersonators not only in religion, theatre and dance but also in contemporary performative mediums like films, television, and the internet. This volume also contains interviews with performers of female impersonation.
Download or read book Re Imagining Sociology in India written by Gita Chadha and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-05-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book maps the intersections between sociology and feminism in the Indian context. It retrieves the lives and work of women pioneers of and in sociology, asking crucial questions of their feminisms and their sociologies. The chapters address the experiential realities of women in the field, pedagogical issues, methodological frameworks, mentoring processes and artistic engagements with academic work. The volume’s strength lies in bringing together Indian scholars from diverse social backgrounds and regions, reflecting on the specificity of the Indian social sciences. The chapters cover a range of key areas, including sexuality, law, environment, science and medicine. This volume will greatly interest students, teachers, researchers and practitioners of sociology, women’s studies, gender studies and feminism, politics and postcolonial studies.
Download or read book Women in Bengal written by Sudarshana Sen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-26 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses the status of women in Bengal, India, by examining the versatile everyday living conditions of women, and how they are represented as individuals and as a category in the media. Contributors to the book start their discussion from the point that women in India have a varied experience of living, thinking, and acting specific to the regional cultural context. Caste ideology specified privileges and sanctions according to innate attributes, differ by sex as well as ethnicity, class, caste, minority status, and marginal position intersect lives and render unique life experiences. With a focus on women and their lived experiences, performances by them and performances imitating women’s roles, the book offers a complex and rich analysis of the reality of women’s lives based on research and reflections by 25 scholars. Organised into two sections, the book presents women in reality, their living conditions, struggles, and women as represented in films, stories, framed in plots sometimes by women and sometimes by men. The chapters provide insights on how institutionalised gender distinctions create subordination and marginality of women and their struggles to survive in a society dominated by heteropatriarchal ideology and its practice. This book improves our understanding of various dimensions of gender and transgender relations in India. It will be of interest to researchers in Gender Studies, South Asian Culture and Society, and Studies on India.
Download or read book Mimetic Desires written by Harshita Mruthinti Kamath and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2022-11-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an exploration of subjects such as Gandhi impersonators, performance artists, and ritual participants, Mimetic Desires makes an intervention toward understanding the phenomenon of impersonation and guising in South Asia and the world. This volume defines impersonation as the temporary assumption of an identity or guise in social and aesthetic performance that is perceived as not one’s own, and guising as sartorial and kinetic play more generally. Interrogating the legitimacy of the purported dialectic between the “real/original” and “fake/dupe,” Mimetic Desires refutes the ordering of identity along the lines of a binary or dichotomy that presupposes the myth of an original identity. By peeling back the layers of performative masks to reveal the process of the masquerade itself, we can see that those with the most social capital are often those with the most power and opportunities to impersonate “up” and “down” social hierarchies. The book’s twelve chapters disclose sites and processes of sociopolitical power facilitated by normative markers of social status relating to race, ethnicity, gender, caste, class, and religion—and how those markers can be manipulated to express and enhance individual and group power. The first comprehensive study to focus on impersonation in South Asia, Mimetic Desires expands on previous scholarship on impersonation and guising in vernacular theatre, dance, public processions, and religious rituals. It is particularly in conversation with the robust scholarship on gender performance in South Asia’s theatrical and dance forms. Mimetic Desires explores some of the contexts and forms of impersonation in South Asia, with its remarkable array of performing arts, to gain insight into the very human and quotidian practices of impersonation and guising.
Download or read book Body Politics Rethinking Gender and Masculinity written by Tanmoy Baghira & Ananya Mukherjee and published by Tanmoy Baghira & Ananya Mukherjee. This book was released on 2021-01-31 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The research on men and masculinities traces back to the women’s and gay liberation movements that challenged existing understandings of gender and power. This proposes to look into gender as socially constructed than what was earlier thought to be biological. As a logical extension of Feminism, Masculinity Studies looks into sex/gender as a discursive social construct and tries to understand them through theoretical hermeneutics. Instead of considering masculinity to be ‘natural character type’, ‘a behavioural average’ or ‘a norm’, the focus should be given to the process through which the gendered bodies perform. In this regard, sex/gender is not fixed, instead is in a continuous flux; thus, masculinity should be recognised as a gender presentation that is continuously transforming and evolving. This volume, Body Politics: Rethinking Gender and Masculinity will engage with the current developments in the field of Masculinity Studies and will try to diversify the issues of gender and masculinity.
Download or read book Public Women in British India written by Rimli Bhattacharya and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book foregrounds the subjectivity of ‘acting women’ amidst violent debates on femininity and education, livelihood and labour, sexuality and marriage. It looks at the emergence of the stage actress as an artist and an ideological construct at critical phases of performance practice in British India. The focus here is on Calcutta, considered the ‘second city of the Empire’ and a nodal point in global trade circuits. Each chapter offers new ways of conceptualising the actress as a professional, a colonial subject, simultaneously the other and the model of the ‘new woman’. An underlying motif is the playing out of the idea of spiritual salvation, redemption and modernity. Analysing the dynamics behind stagecraft and spectacle, the study highlights the politics of demarcation and exclusion of social roles. It presents rich archival work from diverse sources, many translated for the first time. This book makes a distinctive contribution in intertwining performance studies with literary history and art practices within a cross-cultural framework. Interdisciplinary and innovative, it will appeal to scholars and researchers in South Asian theatre and performance studies, history and gender studies.
Download or read book The Scholar written by Niladri R Chatterjee and published by Queer Ink. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Holed up in his tiny apartment, it's all work and no play for Deep Ganguly. He is a Good Indian Boy. In the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship, he knows no one - apart from the television presenters, who are rapidly becoming familiar. Everything seems so quiet and empty after life in Kolkata. And then in the Spirituality section of a bookshop, he meets Devdasi (formerly Deborah). She wants to set him up with the talented but elusive Aditi. But Deep is focused on his research into 1920s Calcutta, and an English writer whose relationship with a young Indian man was doomed. When Deep is asked to show a reluctant Madhav around his new American city, however, he is shocked to find himself sexually attracted to him. What buried secrets from Deep's past will this attraction bring to the surface? And will history inevitably repeat itself? The Scholar is Niladri Chatterjee's passionate and provocative love letter to the power of literature, to the city of Calcutta, and to its undocumented, constantly surprising queer past.
Download or read book The Politics of Cultural Practice written by Rustom Bharucha and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2000-10-27 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refuting the notion that the West is everywhere, Rustom Bharucha draws on the emergent cultures of secular struggle in contemporary India to engage with the volatile global issues of intellectual property rights, cultural tourism, and the marking of minorities on the basis of religion, caste, language, gender, and sexuality.
Download or read book The Indian National Bibliography written by and published by . This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gender and Neoliberalism written by Elisabeth Armstrong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the changing landscape of women’s politics for equality and liberation during the rise of neoliberalism in India. Between 1991 and 2006, the doctrine of liberalization guided Indian politics and economic policy. These neoliberal measures vastly reduced poverty alleviation schemes, price supports for poor farmers, and opened India’s economy to the unpredictability of global financial fluctuations. During this same period, the All India Democratic Women’s Association, which directly opposed the ascendance of neoliberal economics and policies, as well as the simultaneous rise of violent casteism and anti-Muslim communalism, grew from roughly three million members to over ten million. Beginning in the late 1980s, AIDWA turned its attention to women’s lives in rural India. Using a method that began with activist research, the organization developed a sectoral analysis of groups of women who were hardest hit in the new neoliberal order, including Muslim women, and Dalit (oppressed caste) women. AIDWA developed what leaders called inter-sectoral organizing, that centered the demands of the most vulnerable women into the heart of its campaigns and its ideology for social change. Through long-term ethnographic research, predominantly in the northern state of Haryana and the southern state of Tamil Nadu, this book shows how a socialist women’s organization built its oppositional strength by organizing the women most marginalized by neoliberal policies and economics.
Download or read book A Preface to Man written by Subhash Chandra and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2019-01-25 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ann Marie reads fragments of her dead husband's unfinished book, and the many love letters he sent her, and in them the social and political events of the time. As she ponders over the writing and the years that the brilliant Jithendran squandered working for a toy company that makes drum-playing monkeys, the narrative gives way to the sweeping saga of a village by the river Periyar. Grappling with issues of equality, love, caste, religion and politics, Thachanakkara is a microcosm of twentieth-century Kerala. Told through the history of three generations of a feudal Nair family, this sprawling story is reminiscent of the craft of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and has the scale of Sunil Gangopadhyay's Those Days. Manushyanu Oru Amukham is an artistic meditation on human existence and is a contemporary classic.
Download or read book The Snake and the Mongoose written by Nathan McGovern and published by Paperbackshop UK Import. This book was released on 2019 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Snake and The Mongoose, Nathan McGovern turns the commonly-accepted model of the origins of early Indian religions on its head. Instead of assuming a fundamental dichotomy between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical in ancient India, McGovern shows that there were many different groups who all saw themselves as Brahmanical, and out of whose contestation with one another the distinction between Brahmanical and non-Brahmanical emerged.
Download or read book Androgyny in Modern Literature written by T. Hargreaves and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-11-10 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Androgyny in Modern Literature engages with the ways in which the trope of androgyny has shifted during the late nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. Alchemical, platonic, sexological, psychological and decadent representations of androgyny have provided writers with an icon which has been appropriated in diverse ways. This fascinating new study traces different revisions of the psycho-sexual, embodied, cultural and feminist fantasies and repudiations of this unstable but enduring trope across a broad range of writers from the fin de siècle to the present.
Download or read book Gender in Real Time written by Kath Weston and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Art and Visual Culture in India 1857 2007 written by Gayatri Sinha and published by Damaris Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The demand for Modern, Post-Modern and Contemporary Indian art among collectors all over the world has spiralled in the past few years. This book covers major trends in Indian art over the last 150 years, taking in a broad sweep the shift from traditional forms of painting through the mechanical reproduction to 21st century Contemporary art.
Download or read book Early Social Formations written by Amar Farooqui and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
