Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture

Srirupa Chatterjee is Associate Professor of English, Gender Studies, and Body Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts at the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, India. She is the editor of The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings and coeditor of Gendered Violence in Public Spaces: Women’s Narratives of Travel in Neoliberal India.Shweta Rao Garg is an academic, poet, and artist based in Baltimore, MD. She is a former Associate Professor of English at DA-IICT in Gandhinagar, India. She is the coeditor of English Paradigm in India: Essays in Language, Literature and Culture.

“This book is one of the bravest intellectual endeavors to emerge from the Indian subcontinent in recent history. At once deeply political and insightful, it calls out archetypes regarding women’s bodies in the South Asian context and ways in which social categories of caste, class, sexuality, and disability intersect to feed and reflect body images in everything from social media, to television series, to Bollywood cinema and internet postings. A most provocative must-read for any course in cultural studies anywhere!”-Vaidehi Ramanathan, Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of California, Davis “Female Body Image and Beauty Politics in Contemporary Indian Literature and Culture is a much-needed critical intervention into conversations about normative ideas on beauty and embodiment and about body positivity and body inclusivity. The collection as a whole presses us to examine how Eurocentric ideals of female embodiment dominated Indian ideals of femininity and beauty. Accessing an impressive archive of works ranging from fictional and nonfictional accounts of normative and nonnormative female bodies, the essays in this collection collectively theorize the persistent pressures on all facets of women’s appearance and embodiment in postliberalization India. Chatterjee and Garg are to be commended for creating space to rethink the politics of appearance in an Indian frame.”-Anita Mannur, Professor of English at Miami University, and author of Intimate Eating: Racialized Spaces and Radical Futures