Gendering South Asia: Rhetorical Non-Phallic Bodies in the Global Capital

This book looks at how gendered female bodies and non-phallic bodies function, are rhetoricized as functioning, are made to function, or are functioned upon in two extremized spaces--the private and the public. Using rape and menstruation as the marker of the invisible /private and the female body and non-phallic bodies on the street as the marker of the visible/public, it shows how these binaries often overlap in the global capital. The author discusses how the raped body constantly becomes visible in the media, the cycle of the bodily fluid is tabooed and consumerized in the market, and the street constantly marginalizes, victimizes, erases, hypersexualizes, and hyper-visibilizes the female body as valued/devalued capital, and homophobic-transphobic culture alienates the body which is non-heterosexual and non-heteronormative.

An important contribution, this volume will be indispensable for students and teachers of gender and sexuality studies, public health, sociology, human rights, South Asian studies, medical sociology, and cultural studies.

Bibhushana Poudyal is Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University, USA. Her research and teaching emerge from the intervening philosophies and praxes of Internationalism and Global South Solidarities (GSS). She aims to build and practice solidarity among academic workers and community members committed to making decolonial feminist knowledge systems, experiences, and voices of the global majority as a transformative and dignified force within academia and beyond.