ABSTRACT

This book is a study of the resurgence and re-imagination of feminist discourse on gender and sexuality in South Asia as told through its cinematic, literary, and social media narratives. It brings incisive and expert analyses of emerging disruptive articulations that represent an unprecedented surge of feminist response to the culture of sexual violence in South Asia. Here scholars across disciplines and international borders chronicle the expressions of a disruptive feminist solidarity in contemporary South Asia. They offer critical investigations of these newly complicated discourses across narrative forms – hashtag activism on Facebook and Twitter, the writings of diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Bollywood films like Mardaani, feminist Dalit narratives in the fiction of Bama Faustina, social media activism against rape culture, journalistic and cinematic articulations on queer rights, state censorship of "India’s Daughter", and feminist film activism in Bangladesh, Kashmir, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

part I|47 pages

Theoretical Imaginings

chapter 1|27 pages

Decolonizing the Body

Theoretical Imaginings on the Fourth Wave Feminism in India

chapter 2|18 pages

From Mathura to Jyoti

Mapping Public Protests and Anti-Rape Laws in India

part II|76 pages

Social Media

chapter 3|24 pages

Gathering Online, Loitering Offline

Hashtag Activism and the Claim for Public Space by Women in India through the #whyloiter Campaign

chapter 4|20 pages

From Bombay Dost to Global Host

Mobile Imaginings of Cybergaysians in Contemporary Queer India

chapter 5|13 pages

Writing New Sastras

Notes towards Building an Indian Feminist Archive

chapter 6|19 pages

The Two Faces of Afghan Women

Oppressed and Exotic

part III|117 pages

Film

chapter 7|22 pages

Feminist Masculinism

Imagined Response to Violence against Women in Pradeep Sarkar’s Hindi Film, Mardaani (2014)

chapter 8|13 pages

Silent Waters

Mapping Silence and Women’s Agency in Post-Partition Pakistan 1

chapter 9|23 pages

Gender, War, and Resistance

Documentary Cinemas of Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and Nepal

chapter 12|16 pages

Ethical Encounters

Friendship, Reckoning and Healing in Shameem Akhtar’s Daughters of History (1999)

part IV|33 pages

Literature

chapter 13|16 pages

Beyond Violence

South Asian American Feminism in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland

chapter 14|17 pages

The Whole Inside the Hole

Recent Telugu Dalit Women’s Revolutionary Life Writing