Gender and Modernity in Kerala: Politics, Praxes, Paradoxes
Meena T. Pillai
Price
350
ISBN
9789354424632
Language
English
Pages
232
Format
Paperback
Dimensions
140 x 216 mm
Year of Publishing
2023
Territorial Rights
World
Imprint
Orient BlackSwan

This volume brings together scholarly explorations of the idea and practice of modernity, focusing on gendered archives of modernity from Kerala. The essays in this volume investigate marginalised, unexplored and less discernible gendered narratives. They draw upon archival material that ranges from some of the earliest textual iterations of gender since Kerala’s initial engagements with modernity, to its various contemporary digital representations. The volume engages with a range of questions including literary, cultural and digital discourses around women’s clothes, body, menstruation, education, vocation, writing, caste identities and everyday practices. Gender and Modernity in Kerala, while unearthing debates that earlier projects of modernity failed to erase, makes a compelling argument for re-reading India’s multiple modernities from the perspective of gender.

Meena T. Pillai is Professor and Director, Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Kerala.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Gender, Modernity and Kerala
Meena T. Pillai

Confronting Histories
1. Return of the Uncanny Yakshi: Gendering the ‘Spectres’ of Kerala’s Modernities
Meena T. Pillai

2. Imaginations of Pleasure: Against a History of Desire in Kerala
Muraleedharan Tharayil

3. Re-reading Indulekha: Intimate Hierarchies in the Ambiguities of Sanskritised Registers and Domesticated Social Space
Arya K.

4. Stree, Purushan, Napumsakan: Shaping Femininities and Effeminacies in Early-Nineteenth-Century Kerala
Maalavika Ajayakumar

Unsettling Praxes
5. Fashioning the Reading Woman in Colonial Kerala: A Woman Reader’s Memoir in Perspective
Meera C.

6. Liminal Modernities: At the Intersections of Travel Discourses, Gender and Kerala (1880s–1920s)
Sucheta Sankar V.

7. Sewing Malayali Christian Women: Missionary Makings of Sartorial Morality and ‘Modern’ Domesticity in Travancore
Arya A.

8. Cookbooks from Kerala: Creative Adaptations and Inscriptions of Alternative Modernities
Gigy J. Alex

Disquieting Continuities
9. Television Modernity and Mediated Femininities in Kerala
Benita Acca Benjamin

10. Who is Afraid of the Raped Nun?: Discourses, Contestations and Digital Publics
Jobson Joshwa

Contributors

Publisher’s Acknowledgements


Release Date : 09-Feb-2024 Venue : Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters 2024, Thiruvananthapuram
1. Book Discussion by Manu S. Pillai, K. Ravi Raman and Meena T. Pillai | Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters 2024, Thiruvananthapuram.
2. Notice | Published in the Frontline (Fortnightly), Chennai, 17 November 2023.
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