Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality

First published in 1999.Jyoti Puri draws on post-colonial and feminist theory to focus on how women in current-day India conceptualize their gender and sexuality. She provides a groundbreaking ethnographic study based on fifty-four middle- and upper-class Indian women, ranging from the ages of fifteen to thirty-eight. She argues that these women's narratives are shaped by not only the nation-state, but by transnational processes as well.

Woman, Body and Desire in Postcolonial India connects important issues of class an nationhood to the emerging sense of female identity in India, covering previously neglected topics such as menstruation, gay and straight sexual experience, sexual harassment and assault, marriage and motherhood. Puri discovers that attitudes about sexuality and gender are surprisingly similar in India and Western countries.

Author: Jyoti Puri
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 06/21/1999
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.01h x 6.11w x 0.72d
ISBN: 9780415921282

About the Author
Jyoti Puri is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Simmons College, Boston.