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The essays in this collection, written over the last five years, interrogate a variety of Indian texts and contexts along intersecting axes of gender, nation, and desire, addressing both the material and the representational. A couple of these essays grew out of seeds planted during the author’s years at Manushi (she is co-founder of this ground-breaking Indian feminist magazine). Most others emerged from further research in areas that first opened up to Vanita while working on Same-Sex Love in India and her subsequent books, Queering India and Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West. Intertextuality is a primary theme in these essays. Vanita is interested in the ways in which medieval texts speak to each other and draw on earlier canonical works, rewriting and transforming narrative in a spirit of respectful conversation. In very different registers, modern texts, such as nineteenth-century poetry and twentieth-century fiction and cinema, also converse with each other and with older texts. Another equally interesting but distinctly different area of enquiry addressed in these essays is the way texts are received in later periods or by other cultures in the same period. Boldly written, and addressing a number of issues which South Asian society would ‘rather not talk about’, this is a timely volume which effectively narrows the seemingly looming gap between sexuality and gender.
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Pages : 336
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