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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
Changing The Subject Of Sati, Deepa Das Acevedo
Changing The Subject Of Sati, Deepa Das Acevedo
Faculty Articles
Charan Shah's 1999 death was widely considered to be the first sati, or widow immolation, to have occurred in India in over twenty years. Media coverage of the event focused on procedural minutiae-her sari, her demeanor-and ultimately, several progressive commentators came to the counterintuitive conclusion that the ritually anomalous nature of Charan's death confirmed its voluntary, secular, and noncriminal nature. This article argues that the "unlabeling" of Charan's death, like those of other women between 1999 and 2006, reflects a tension between the nonindividuated, impervious model of personhood exemplified by sati and the particularized citizen-subject of liberal-democratic politics in India.
In Slime And Darkness: The Metaphor Of Filth In Criminal Justice, Martha Grace Duncan
In Slime And Darkness: The Metaphor Of Filth In Criminal Justice, Martha Grace Duncan
Faculty Articles
An article such as this one, which seeks to examine the labyrinthine chains of meanings that we associate with illegal behavior, cries out for an interdisciplinary approach. Specifically, it demands a source that can reveal our unconscious as well as our conscious associations. Such a source is classical literature -- works of fiction that, by virtue of being read and loved through centuries and across continents, have proven their capacity to strike a responsive chord in their readers. Therefore, in Part II of this Article, I employ the classics, supplemented by occasional examples from contemporary fiction, history, and theology, to …