Women's Sexuality and Modern India in a Rapture of Distress

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Every country has a unique relationship to patriarchy. Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress lays out the vexed place of 'women's sexuality' in the Indian patriarchal imagination, alongside snapshots of how individual middle-class Indian women experience and imagine their sexuality. The book's argument is that women's long-standing adaptations to patriarchy make it complicated for them to exit its plot: aesthetics, mother-daughter relationships, and inter-generational differences are adhesives to the patriarchal psyche. Using interview excerpts, flash frames from psychotherapy sessions, and literary readings, the author-a psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist-describes how women experience, escape from, and grieve sex under patriarchy, and what geography might have to do with how sexual liberation gets defined.

AMRITA NARAYANAN has been in practice since 2007, when she earned her doctorate in Clinical Psychology (Psy.D.). She is the editor of The Parrots of Desire: 3000 Years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018). In 2019, she was accepted to the International Psychoanalytic Association via the Indian Psychoanalytical Society. She has served as Visiting Faculty at Ambedkar, KREA, and Ashoka universities, and has a private practice in Goa.

'Fluidly traverses literature, psychoanalysis, and real life to deliver heft. Rich, startling insights are posed as sharp, often uncomfortable, questions that force the reader to rethink so-called "normal" assumptions.'