Women's Sexuality and Modern India

Description

Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In A Rapture of Distress lays out the vexed place of ‘women’s sexuality’ in the Indian patriarchal imagination,alongside snapshots of how individual upper-middle-class Indian women experience and imagine their sexuality. The book’s argument is that women’s long-standing adaptations to patriarchy make it complicated for them to exit its plot: aesthetics, mother-daughter relationships,and inter-generational differences are adhesives to the patriarchal psyche.

Using interview excerpts, flash frames from psychotherapy sessions, and literary readings, the author—a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist—describes how women experience, escape from, and grieve sex under patriarchy, and what geography might have to do with how sexual liberation gets defined

About the author:

Amrita Narayanan is a practicing clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is the editor of The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years ofErotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018), and a contributor to Psychoanalysis in the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Familyand Childhood (LexingtonBooks, 2018) and to Pha(bu)llus: a cultural history of the Phallus (Harper Collins, 2020)

Reviews

Fluidly traverses literature, psychoanalysis, and real life to deliver heft. Rich startling insights are posed as sharp, often uncomfortable, questions that force the reader to rethink so-called “normal" assumptions.’ —Urvashi Butalia, Writer and publisher

‘A lyrical intelligence animates this highly insightful account . . . by one of the most original psychoanalysts of her generation.’ —Sudhir Kakar, Psychoanalyst and author

Table of contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
by Amrita Narayanan
Chapter 2 Sympathies and Oppressions
Chapter 3 Society for the Preservation of Heterosexuality
Chapter 4 If I win, We Lose
Chapter 5 Middle Class Police and Fugitives
Chapter 6 Aesthetic Arrests
Chapter 7 Desire and Envy Amongst Un-equals
Chapter 8 Mutters, Whimpers, Shouts
Chapter 9 The Pleasures and Perils of Secret Agents
Chapter 10 Trophies and Spoil(er)s
Chapter 11 Who Else is in Mother's Bed?
Chapter 12 Afterword