Gender, Communication and Language in South Asia

(generated from a query on linganth listserver, May 2003)
Repondents included: Jim Wilce, Ellen Contini-Moravia, Maggie Ronkin, John McCreery

  1. Ahearn, Laura M. 2001 Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

  2. Appadurai, Arjun, Frank J. Koram and Margaret Mills. 1991 Gender, Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

  3. Grima, Benedicte 1992 The Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women: "The Misfortunes Which Have Befallen Me". Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. [This is an accessible ethnography of communication and a fascinating ethnographic account of culturally constructed and socially performed emotions.]

  4. Hall, Kira 1997 "Go Suck Your Husband's Sugarcane..." In Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. K. Hall and A. Livia, eds. Pp. 430-460. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Documents how any acceptance or position hijras--Indian transgendered persons-have is won by their own assertions, not granted by any sort of cultural value such as inclusivism.]

  5. Hall, Kira and O'Donovan, Veronica 1996 "Shifting gender positions among Hindi-speaking hijras". In V. Bergvall, J. Bing, and A. Freed (eds.), Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice. Longman

  6. Petievich, Carla. 2001. 2001. "Rekhti: Impersonating the Feminine in Urdu Poetry". South Asia, vol. 24. [On one of a number of Indo-Muslim poetries composed by men and narrated in the feminine voice.]

  7. Raheja, Gloria Goodwin and Gold, Ann Grodzins 1994 Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and kinship in North India. U. of California Press

  8. Riessman, Catherine. 2000 'Stigma and everyday resistance practices: Childless women in South India.' Gender and Society 14 (1): 111-135.

  9. Riessman, Catherine 2001 Positioning gender identity in narratives of infertility: South Indian women's lives in context. In M. C. Inhorn and F. van Balen, eds. Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies. Berkeley: University of California Press.

  10. Santhya, Dasvarma. 2002. "Spousal communication on reproductive illness among rural women Culture," Health & Sexuality 4, no. 2 (2002): 223-236.

  11. Vatuk, Sylvia. 1969a "Reference, Address and Fictive Kinship in Urban North India." Ethnology 8: 255-272.

  12. ......... 1969b. "A Structural Analysis of the Hindi Kinship Terminology." Contributions to Indian Sociology. New Series 3.94-115.

  13. Wilce, James M. 1998 Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, No 21. [Shows how "complaints" in medical and other domains become opportunities for resistance to gender hierarchies]

  14. Wilce, James M. In press To "speak beautifully" in Bangladesh: Subjectivity as pagalami. In The Edge of Experience: Culture, Subjectivity, and Schizophrenia. J. Jenkins and R. Barrett, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press. [Uncovers gender bending as one of several keys to the significance of "madness" in Bangladesh]