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.
Introduction (Sonora Jha and Alka Kurian)
Part 1: Theoretical Imaginings and Context
1. Sex Wars and the Return to the Autonomous: Theoretical Imaginings on the
Fourth Wave Feminisms in South Asia (Alka Kurian)
2. From Mathura to Jyoti: Mapping Public Protests and Anti-Rape Laws in
India
(Bidisha Biswas)
Part 2: Social Media
3. Gathering Online, Loitering Offline: Hashtag Activism and the Claim for
Public Space by Women in India Through the #WhyLoiter Campaign (Sonora Jha)
4. From Bombay Dost to Global Host: Mobile Imaginings of Cybergaysians in
Contemporary Queer India (Rahul Gairola)
5. Writing New Sastras: notes towards building an Indian feminist archive
(Padmini Ray Murray)
6. The two faces of Afghan women: Oppressed and exotic (Shahnaz Khan)
Part 3: Film
7. Feminist Masculinism: Imagined Response to Violence Against Women in
Pradeep Sarkars Hindi Film, Mardaani (Shreerekha Subramanian)
8. Silent Waters: Mapping Silence and Womens Agency in Post-Partition
Pakistan (Amrita Ghosh)
9. Gender, War, and Resistance: Documentary Cinemas of Kashmir, Sri Lanka,
and Nepal (Alka Kurian)
10. Queering South Asia? Deviant sexualities and the role of the Indian media
in shaping perceptions. (Shoba Sharad Rajgopal)
11. The Complexities of Transnational Female Solidarity in Driving with Selvi
(Rajni Srikanth)
12. Ethical Encounters: Friendship, Reckoning, and Healing in Shameem
Akhtars Daughters of History (1999) (Elora Chowdhury)
Part 4: Literature
13. Beyond Violence: South Asian American Feminism in Jhumpa Lahiris The
Lowland
(Nalini Iyer)
14. The Whole Inside the Hole: Recent Telugu Dalit Womens Revolutionary Life
Writing (Bonnie Zare)
Sonora Jha is Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Seattle University.
Alka Kurian is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Washington Bothell, USA.
