Unveiling Desire: Fallen Women in Literature, Culture, and Films of the East

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.

Unveiling Desire shows 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, the contributors examine how the struggle for women’s liberation is truly global.

CONTENTS Foreword Nawal El-Saadawi   Introduction Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow   Part One: Chastity, Fidelity and Women’s Cross-Cultural Encounters 1. Feminist Neo-Imperialism in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis               Colette Morrow   2. The Forgotten Women of 1971: Bangladesh’s Failure to Remember Rape Victims of the Liberation War            Firdous Azim   3. Fragmented State, Fragmented Women: Reading Gender, Reading History in Partition Fiction              Paramita Halder   4. The Trope of the “Fallen Women” in the Fiction of Bangladeshi Women Writers              Hafiza Nilofar Khan   Part Two: Forbidden Desires and Misogynist Enculturation    5. Polyamorous Draupadi: Adharma or Emancipation?           Devaleena Das   6. Damaged Goods! Managed Gods!  Indian Cinema’s Virtuous Hierarchies             Amrit Gangar   7. Roop Taraashi: Sex, Culture, Violence, Impersonation and the Politics of the Inner Sanctum              Naina Dey   Part Three: Political Economy and Questioning Tradition in the Far East 8. More Than an Exchange of Fluids: Thai Prostitutes and the Western Sexual Economy            Louis Betty   9. Representing Bad Women in Wu Zetian Si Da Qi’An: Political Criticism in Late Qing Crime Fiction            Lavinia Benedetti   10. The Problematic Maternal in Moto Hagio’s Graphic Fiction: An Analysis of “Iguana Daughter”           Tomoko Kuribayashi   Part Four: Unchaste Goddesses and Transgressive Women in a Turbulent Nation 11. A Dark Goddess for a Fallen World: Mapping Apocalypse in some of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's Novels             Meenakshi Malhotra   12. Desire and Dharma: A Study of the Representation of Fallen Women in the Novels of Bankim Chandra            Chandrani Biswas   13. The Fallen Woman in Bengali Literature: Binodini Dasi and Tagore’s Chokher Bali          Radha Chakravarty   Part Five: The Moral Frontiers of Lesbianism in the East      14. Shaking the Throne of God: Muslim Women Writers Who Dared         Feroza Jussawalla   15. Homoeroticism and Re-accessing the Idea of ‘Fallen Woman’ in Keval Sood’s Murgikhana        Kuhu Sharma Chanana   Afterword Contributors Index