Title:The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: Popular Penguins
Author: Michel Foucault
Price: 195/-
Michel Foucault's The Will to Knowledge is the first part of his influential trilogy of books on
the history of sexuality. He argues that the recent explosion of discussion about sex in the West means that, far from being liberated, we are in the process of making a science of sexuality that is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure. This is a brilliant polemic from a groundbreaking radical intellectual.
Title: In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal (Hardcover)
Author: Niklaus Largier , Graham Harman (Translator)
ISBN-10: 189095165X, ISBN-13: 978-1890951658
Binding: Hardcover
Date: 1 edition (April 1, 2007)
Publisher: Zone Books
Number of Pages: Zone Books
Price: $37.00
Product Description
In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal is a new history of voluntary flagellation in Europe, from its invention in medieval religious devotion to its use in the modern pornographic imagination. Working with a wide range of religious, literary, and medical texts and images, Niklaus Largier explores the emotional and sensual, religious and erotic excitement of the whip, a crucial instrument of stimulation in devotional and sexual practices. From early modern pornography to the Marquis de Sade and the fantasies of Swinburne and Joyce, the erotic and devotional imagination drew on the whip.
Largier explores how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation problematized the medieval culture of arousal. The stimulating qualities of medieval visual displays, especially flagellant practices, processions, and spectacles, were subjected to a criticism that sought to control the imagination. In modern bourgeois life the practice, effects, and imagery of flagellation became a central site of investigation into concerns and anxieties about exercising emotional self-control and censoring fantasy. Modern references to flagellant practice in the works of Swinburne, Proust, and Joyce testified not only to a "decadent" fascination with "medieval" cultures or "perverse sexuality," but also to a fascination that nineteenth-century censorship, informed by psychopathological discourses, had obliterated. Such evocations of flagellation, Largier explains, were attempts to recover a culture of stimulation and imagination—both erotic and devotional—that transcended the modern boundaries of sexuality.
About the Author
Niklaus Largier is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Religious Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Zeit, Zeitlichkeit, Ewigkeit and Diogenes der Kyniker. He is also the editor of the selected writings of Meister Eckhart.
Title: Dalit Movement in IndiaLocal Practices, Global Connections
Author: Eva-Maria Hardtmann
ISBN 13: 9780195697841, ISBN10: 0195697847
Binding: hardbackDate: November 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press Number of Pages: 304 pages
Price: 675/-
Title: Chaste Wives and Prostitute SistersPatriarchy and Prostitution among the Bedias of India
Author: Anuja Agrawal
ISBN: 978-0-415-43077-7
Binding: Hardback
Date: 01/04/2007
Publisher: Routledge India
Number of Pages:
Price: 650/-
About the Book
This book is an anthropological study of the unusual coincidence of prostitution and patriarchy among an extremely marginalized group in north India, the Bedias, who are also a de-notified community.
It is the first detailed account of the implications of a systematic practice of familial prostitution on the kinship structures and marriage practices of a community. This starkly manifests among the Bedias in the clear separation between sisters and daughters who engage in prostitution and wives and daughters-in-law who do not. The Bedias exemplify a situation in which prostitution of young unmarried women is the mainstay of the familial economy of an entire social group. Tracing the recent origins of the practice in the community, the author goes on to explore the manner in which this familial economy manifests itself in the lives of individual women and the kind of family groupings it produces. She then examines the repercussion this economy has on the lives of Bedia men, how the problem of their marriage is resolved, and how the Bedia wives become repositories of female purity which otherwise stands jeopardized by Bedia sisters engaged in prostitution. (From http://www.routledge.com/)
Title: The Last Jews of Kerala
Author: Edna Fernandes
ISBN13: 9780670081479
Binding: PaperbackPublishing
Date: October 2008
Publisher: Penguin , Vikin g
Number of Pages: 216 pp
Price: Rs 499.00
Separated by a narrow stretch of swamp-like waters, and distinguished by the colour of their skin, the Black Jews and the White Jews have been locked in a rancorous feud for centuries. Only now, when their combined number has diminished to less than 50 and they are on the threshold of extinction, have the two remaining Jewish communities in south India begun to realise that their destiny, and their undoing, is the same. Living in Cochin alongside this last generation, Edna Fernandes tells their story from the illustrious arrival of their ancestors from the court of King Solomon, through their long heyday of wealth, tolerance and privilege to their present twilit existence, as synagogues crumble into disuse and weddings disappear, leaving only funerals.
