Women's Sexuality and Modern India : In a Rapture of Distress

Between the first and second decade of the millennium, women across the world reconsidered the sexual roles they had been playing under patriarchy. The 2012 protests in India triggered some of this global change, ushering Indians squarely into the desired yet uncomfortable " third wave" feminism which demands the recognition of women as sexual subjects. Beginning from the premise that each country is in a unique relationship to patriarchy, Women's Sexuality in India: In a Rapture of Distress offers pictures of how individual Indian women locate their sexuality amidst the fantasies of Indian patriarchy, and of world culture that imagine their sexuality for them.

Built from a data set of upper-middle class women, the book opens up a number of provocative questions. How is dismantling the patriarchy in the imagination different from fighting patriarchy in the outer world? What aspects of sex under patriarchy do women want to give up, and what would they like to keep? What conflicts unfold when daughters welcome as "sexual liberation" ideas that their mothers believed had "come from the west", a west that has been, until fairly recently, a hated colonial oppressor? How did the control of upper-middle class women's sexuality serve as an anchor for collective anxieties about the inherent instability of gender and sexuality? What is the nature of the spectator effect when post-sexual revolution countries listen to the sexuality narratives of countries like India that have not had a sexual revolution?

Amrita Narayanan

Amrita Narayanan is a practicing clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She is the editor of The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018), and a contributor to Psychoanalysis in the Indian Terroir: Emerging Themes in Culture, Family and Childhood (Lexington Books, 2018) and to Pha(bu)llus: a cultural history of the Phallus (Harper Collins, 2020).