The product of many years of research, this unique book presents fascinating perspectives on contemporary lesbian life in India and unravels some of the history of lesbian desire from centuries past. Through detailed examination of mythology, cosmology, ancient art and artefacts and her exegesis of ancient Sanskrit texts, Thadani constructs a tapestry of feminine kinship, genealogy and sexual or erotic bonding between women (sakhiyani) in ancient India. The author offers an historical perspective on the effect of colonization upon lesbian identities in India, showing how women were viewed by Western imperialists either as soft victims or as sexually dangerous, possessing an overgrown clitoris and in need of heterosexual domestication. The second half of the book focuses on contemporary lesbian realities and issues, including lesbian marriages, suicide pacts, forging lesbian space, lesbian human rights, lesbophobia, sexual exile and the different construction of gender, family and possible kinship alliances.
This book examines the creation of lesbian communities in India from the 1980s through the early 2000s and explores the everyday practices that comprise queer activism in India.
Fueled by 15 years of road trips, this traveling history follows the search for relics, lost temples, and sacred sites that comprise the archaeology of lesbians in ancient India. While exploring the places, stories, and people of India, the author goes beneath the surface of more recent patriarchal cultures that have neglected or desecrated icons of the sacred feminine to reveal the marvels and mythology nearly forgotten by history.
A study of the "double goddess" iconography prominent in Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures that expands our understanding of female sovereignty. Celebrates this archetype of sacred female bonding and depicts a vast array of relationships women may form with themselves and each other to explore a sense of self and empowerment, and to share power with each other.
Swa wiccan taeca?: ?as the witches teach.' So, explained the Old English translator, it was witches who counseled people to ?bring their offerings to earth-fast stone and also to trees and to wellsprings.' His contextualizing commentary on a Frankish penitential reveals the witches? intimate association with animist, earth-based ceremonies, contradicting the now-engrained idea that they were ?wicked.' In a compelling exploration of language, archaeology, early medieval literature and art, Max Dashu pulls the covers off ethnic lore known to few except scholarly specialists. She shows that the old ethnic names for ?witch? signify wisewoman, prophetess, diviner, healer, shapeshifter, and dreamer. She fleshes out the spiritual culture of the Norse völur (?staff-women?), with their oracular ceremonies, incantations, and ?sitting-out? on the land for wisdom. She examines archaeological finds of women's ritual staffs, many of which symbolize the distaff, a spinning tool that connects with broader European themes of goddesses, fates, witches, and female power. Ecclesiastical records show that these aspects of European women's spiritual culture survived state conversions to Christianity. Witches and Pagans plunges into the megalithic taproot of the elder kindreds, and the ancestral Old Woman known as the Cailleach. It draws on priestly Frankish and German sources to trace the foundational witch-legend of the Women Who Go by Night with the Goddess'and her links to women's spinning sacraments in the orature of Holle, Fraw Percht, and Swanfooted Berthe. The book also looks at the sexual politics of early witch burnings and the female ordeal of treading red-hot iron. Anglo-Saxon ?mystery-singers? shed light on ancestor veneration in early medieval Europe.The webs of Wyrd, weavers? ceremonies, herb-chanters, crystal balls and the Völuspá: this book uncovers the authentic ethnic roots of witchcraft. Putting the common woman at the center results in a very different view of European history than the one we have been taught. Sagas, ecclesiastical canons, laws, chronicles, charms, manuscripts and sculpture show the spiritual leadership of women and the goddesses, fates, and ancestors they revered. These strands can help to reweave the ripped webs of women's culture.
Cosmopolitan Sexuality articulates the ethnographic and anthropological studies of varied embodied projects in Indian metropolises. With particular reference to the city of Bombay, it draws evidences of gendered representations – their desires, appeal and aspirations to be and to express their sense of self. It attempts to establish arguments to a deconstructive notion of any fixation of identity categories and build a robust and complex understanding of sexual experiences, love, emotions and interpersonal relationships; an unusual way of local as well as global patterns that are culturally scathed in the contemporary new India. The book is relevant to contemporary embodiment studies – the invasive means of desiring corporeal reconstruction on one hand, and dress, ornamentation, and makeup on the other. Transgressive politics are discursively and materially constructed to their everydayness and their unique ways of re-representation. 'Health' is viewed in new dynamics of shared knowledges and communicative practices that has enabled building fresh arguments around community and public health, with new visions of the anthropologies of empowerment.
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.
This is a concept from physics in which it is surmised that small actions can have enormous consequences, and that the flutter of a butterfly's wing on one side of the world can cause devastating storms on the other side. This work includes poems on a range of subjects, including death, history, culture physics, and more.
This book documents the changing realities in the fields of linguistics, literature and culture in Asia, resulting from globalization, modernisation and rapid technological development. It consists of sixteen essays by academics and researchers around the world, reflecting on the interface between the global and the local, and its impact on the local and regional languages, literatures and cultures of Asia. This scenario, which exemplifies language contact in action, is captured by the book mainly to demonstrate that linguistic negotiations, appropriations and indeed changes are not one-way. As such, their implications on language use, language choice, language policy and planning, literacy and pedagogy, identity, subjectivity and culture need to be closely examined. The uniqueness of this book lies in its attempt to showcase original research in a variety of multicultural settings. Its multi- and cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers from diverse backgrounds. This book will serve as a useful reference that is both scholarly and informative for researchers as well as academics in the fields of linguistics, literature and culture.
