ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Unveiling Desire, Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow show that the duality of the fallen/saved woman is as prevalent in Eastern culture as it is in the West, specifically in literature and films. Using examples from the Middle to Far East, including Iran, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Thailand, Japan, and China, this anthology challenges the fascination with Eastern women as passive, abject, or sexually exotic, but also resists the temptation to then focus on the veil, geisha, sati, or Muslim women’s oppression without exploring Eastern women’s sexuality beyond these contexts. The chapters cover instead mind/body sexual politics, patriarchal cultural constructs, the anatomy of sex and power in relation to myth and culture, denigration of female anatomy, and gender performativity. From Persepolis to Bollywood, and from fairy tales to crime fiction, the contributors to Unveiling Desire show how the struggle for women’s liberation is truly global.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

DEVALEENA DAS is a lecturer in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

COLETTE MORROW is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, Northwest in Hammond, Indiana. She is the co-editor (with Terri Ann Frederick) of the reader Getting in is Not Enough: Women and the Global Workplace, and a former president of the National Women's Studies Association.

REVIEWS

"Enhanced for academia, Unveiling Desire: Fallen Women in Literature, Culture, and Films of the East is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to college and university library Women's Studies, Asian Studies, Literary Studies, Film/Media Studies collections."

— Midwest Book Review

"Offers a vibrant and valuable addition the field, with case studies and insights that are fresh and pertinent. The reader will become better acquainted with more than just the trope of the fallen women in non-Western culture; he or she will learn more about the lives, the experiences, the intellectual and affective history, as well as the rich complexity of Eastern women."

— Women's Studies

“Unveiling Desire is an excellent book-length study of non-Western women’s sexuality and sexual desires that provides a much-needed corrective to Western feminist Orientalisms and their attendant chauvinisms. Breathtaking in its scope—from the nineteenth-century Bengali widow in South Asia to sex workers in Tokugawa-era Japan—this collection of essays is a must read for anyone interested in gender, sexuality, and feminism.”

— Krupa Shandilya, author of Intimate Relations: Social Reform and the Late Nineteenth-Century South Asian Novel

"Weekly Book List, April 20, 2018" by Nina Ayoub

— Chronicle of Higher Education

“Unveiling Desire’s greatest contribution is its exploration of the nexus of Eastern and Western feminisms. Readers will discover how the trope of the fallen woman appears in a fascinating array of texts, engaging themes of female agency, colonialism, nationalism, and patriarchal traditions.”

— Amy Levin, editor of Global Mobilities: Refugees, Exiles, and Immigrants in Museums and Archives

"Without this important book, many of the texts that are analyzed would be lost in a canon that all too often privileges Eurocentric perspectives and concerns."

— RGWS: A Feminist Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Foreword
Nawal El-Saadawi

Introduction
Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow

Part One: Chastity, Fidelity and Women’s Cross-Cultural Encounters
1. Feminist Neo-Imperialism in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
              Colette Morrow

2. The Forgotten Women of 1971: Bangladesh’s Failure to Remember Rape Victims of the Liberation War
           Firdous Azim

3. Fragmented State, Fragmented Women: Reading Gender, Reading History in Partition Fiction
             Paramita Halder

4. The Trope of the “Fallen Women” in the Fiction of Bangladeshi Women Writers
             Hafiza Nilofar Khan

Part Two: Forbidden Desires and Misogynist Enculturation
5. Polyamorous Draupadi: Adharma or Emancipation?
          Devaleena Das

6. Damaged Goods! Managed Gods! Indian Cinema’s Virtuous Hierarchies
            Amrit Gangar

7. Roop Taraashi: Sex, Culture, Violence, Impersonation and the Politics of the Inner Sanctum
             Naina Dey

Part Three: Political Economy and Questioning Tradition in the Far East
8. More Than an Exchange of Fluids: Thai Prostitutes and the Western Sexual Economy
           Louis Betty

9. Representing Bad Women in Wu Zetian Si Da Qi’An: Political Criticism in Late Qing Crime Fiction
           Lavinia Benedetti

10. The Problematic Maternal in Moto Hagio’s Graphic Fiction: An Analysis of “Iguana Daughter”
          Tomoko Kuribayashi

Part Four: Unchaste Goddesses and Transgressive Women in a Turbulent Nation
11. A Dark Goddess for a Fallen World: Mapping Apocalypse in some of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Novels
            Meenakshi Malhotra

12. Desire and Dharma: A Study of the Representation of Fallen Women in the Novels of Bankim Chandra
           Chandrani Biswas

13. The Fallen Woman in Bengali Literature: Binodini Dasi and Tagore’s Chokher Bali
         Radha Chakravarty

Part Five: The Moral Frontiers of Lesbianism in the East
14. Shaking the Throne of God: Muslim Women Writers Who Dared
        Feroza Jussawalla

15. Homoeroticism and Re-accessing the Idea of ‘Fallen Woman’ in Keval Sood’s Murgikhana
      Kuhu Sharma Chanana

Afterword
Contributors
Index