ABSTRACT

This volume looks at the emerging forms of intimacies in contemporary India. Drawing on rigorous academic research and pop culture phenomena, the volume:

  • Brings together themes of nationhood, motherhood, disability, masculinity, ethnicity, kinship, and sexuality, and attempts to understand them within a more complex web of issues related to space, social justice, marginality, and communication;

  • Focuses on the struggles for intimacy by the disabled, queer, Dalit, and other subalterns, as well as people with non-human intimacies, to propose an alternative theory of the politics of belonging;

  • Explores the role of social and new media in understanding and negotiating intimacies and anxieties.

Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, sexuality and gender studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, and minority studies.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

The politics of belonging: anxiety and intimacy

part I|46 pages

Intimacy, marginality, and anxiety

chapter 2|17 pages

Emotions in the context of caste slavery

Exploring the missionary writings on Kerala

chapter 3|19 pages

Nature and belonging

Distance, development, and intimacy

part II|34 pages

Rethinking intimacy, contemporarity vis-à-vis the conventional institutions

chapter 5|12 pages

Reading queerness

Same-sex marriages in India

chapter 6|12 pages

Homes as conversions

Literalising the metaphor of Ghar Wapsi

part III|43 pages

Dissident body and belonging

chapter 7|25 pages

Anti-caste communitas and outcaste experience

Space, body, displacement, and writing

part IV|48 pages

Space, vigilance, and getting intimate

chapter 9|22 pages

The modern-day sex worker

The intimate ‘Other’ of intimacy and belonging

chapter 10|13 pages

Public spaces and private intimacies

The ‘Politics of Belonging’ in parks

chapter 11|11 pages

Queer intimacies in the time of new media

When Grindr produces alternative cartographies

part V|26 pages

Textual belongings

chapter 13|14 pages

Hesitant intimacy

North East Indian English poetry vis-à-vis the Indian nationhood

part VI|40 pages

Techno intimacies

chapter 14|21 pages

Maternal intimacies online

How Indian mom bloggers reconfigure self, body, family, and community