Unveiling Desire

Fallen Women in Literature, Culture, and Films of the East

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Edited by Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow

Type: Studies
Subject: General
Keywords: desire, woman, attraction, sexuality
Publishing date: 2018
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Language: English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 298 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8135-8784-4

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Book Presentation:
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.

About the authors:
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.

Press Reviews:
"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

"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

"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

"Weekly Book List, April 20, 2018" by Nina Ayoub
— Chronicle of Higher Education

"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

"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