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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis
Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila,South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the “modern” selves envisioned within them are …
Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis
Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, And Defecating Men: The Power Of Storytelling In Maithil Women’S Tales, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
What can we learn about the way that folk storytelling operates for tellers and audience members by examining the telling of stories by characters within such narratives? I examine Maithil women’s folktales in which stories of women’s suffering at the hands of other women are first suppressed and later overheard by men who have the power to alleviate such suffering. Maithil women are pitted against one another in their pursuit of security and resources in the context of patrilineal formations. The solidarities such women nonetheless form—in part through sharing stories and keeping each other’s secrets—serve to mitigate their suffering and …
Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers In Maithil Women's Expressive Forms, Coralynn V. Davis
Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers In Maithil Women's Expressive Forms, Coralynn V. Davis
Faculty Journal Articles
Ponds are ubiquitous in the Maithil region of Nepal, and they figure prominently in folk narratives and ceremonial paintings produced by women there. I argue that in Maithil women's folktales, as in their paintings, the trope of ponds shifts the imaginative register toward women's perspectives and the importance of women's knowledge and influence in shaping Maithil society, even as this register shift occurs within plots featuring male protagonists. I argue further that in the absence of a habit of exegesis in their expressive arts, and given the cross-referential, dialogic nature of expressive practices, a methodology that draws into interpretive conversation …