Das Devaleena.Morrow Colette. - Fallen Women in Literature, Culture, and Films of the East

Edited by

Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Das, Devaleena. | Morrow, Colette.

Title: Unveiling desire : fallen women in literature, culture, and films of the east / edited by Devaleena Das, Colette Morrow ; foreword by Nawal El-Saadawi ; contributions by Devaleena Das ; contributions by Colette Morrow ; contributions by Firdous Azim ; contributions by Paramita Halder ; contributions by Hafiza Nilofar Khan ; contributions by Amrit Gangar ; contributions by Naina Dey ; contributions by Louis Betty ; contributions by Lavinia Benedetti ; contributions by Tomoko Kuribayashi ; contributions by Meenakshi Malhotra ; contributions by Chandrani Biswas ; contributions by Radha Chakravarty ; contributions by Feroza Jussawalla ; contributions by Kuhu Sharma Chanana.

Description: New Brunswick, Camden : Rutgers University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017012773 (print) | LCCN 2017050281 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813587868 (E-pub) | ISBN 9780813587875 (Web PDF) | ISBN 9780813587851 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813587844 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: WomenSexual behaviorOrient. | Femmes fataleOrient. | SymbolismOrient. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women's Studies. | PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Asian / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Middle Eastern.

Classification: LCC HQ29 (ebook) | LCC HQ29 .U58 2018 (print) | DDC 306.7082095dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017012773

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright 2018 by Rutgers, The State University

Individual chapters copyright 2018 in the names of their authors

All rights reserved

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We dedicate this book to the transgressive womenpast and presentwho made it possible and the feminist men who supported its creation, development, and publication.

Nawal El-Saadawi

Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow

Colette Morrow

Firdous Azim

Paramita Halder

Hafiza Nilofar Khan

Devaleena Das

Amrit Gangar

Naina Dey

Louis Betty

Lavinia Benedetti

Tomoko Kuribayashi

Meenakshi Malhotra

Chandrani Biswas

Radha Chakravarty

Feroza Jussawalla

Kuhu Sharma Chanana

Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow

Unveiling Desire: Fallen Women in Literature, Culture, and Films of the East offers new perspectives of different characters of women and various female professions imposed on them by the patriarchal, classist, religious, racist system. This system is universal, not Eastern or Western, not Islamic or Christian or other. It is inherited from the old slave period in history and survives until today, the neopostmodern slave capitalist patriarchal system. Women and slaves were and are used by their masters: physically, spiritually, sexually, economically, socially, morally, and religiously.

Women and slaves never submitted to this multiple oppression and exploitation. The so-called sexual prostitution was and is a profession created by the system to satisfy the sexual needs of the hypersexual male. But only women are punished or condemned like their Mother Eve; the hypersexuality of men is accepted or even praised.

The book offers a new discourse to undo these injustices and double standards, to liberate the so-called hypersexually erotic, hysterical, rebellious woman from the prison of patriarchy, religion, and politics. To undo the major taboos inherited since slavery, to show the power of women in their struggle and resistance, this book offers a model for transnational feminist research that promotes equality, justice, freedom, and dignity for all and encourages women to resist old-slave-colonial and neocolonial sexual and cultural constructs.

It is an illuminating book, and I hope many women and men read it in the East and in the West as well.

Nawal El-Saadawi

Cairo, Egypt

July 26, 2015

Devaleena Das and Colette Morrow

We Were Artists... Not Gandi Kanjri [dirty entertainers]

Louise Brown, The Dancing Girls of Lahore

She was no longer as beautiful as shed once been. Her skin was waxy looking, and her features puffy. Or perhaps I was only seeing her that way. A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one.

Nawal El-Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero

When womens performance of sexuality crosses normative boundaries, it is the object of patriarchal fear and fascination. The trope of female fallenness puts women back in their place: they are virgins and chaste wives and mothers if they obey the rules, but whores and outcasts if they transgress. Of course, local contexts determine specific expressions of this binary not only with respect to fixed conditions, such as received traditions and histories, but also in relation to dynamic processes in which individuals and social institutions employ the virgin/whore opposition to warrant and pursue diverse agendas. Unveiling Desire explores the fallen woman trope and the virgin/whore dichotomy in cultural and artistic production of the East, looking for commonalities and differences that enhance our understanding of how it maintains and changes sexual politics, the principles and processes that structure gender relations and distribute power among these formations, locally and globally. This exploration is undertaken with a mindfulness that, in addition to the tropes intracultural functions and meanings, the West has utilized and continues to deploy female fallenness to colonize the East, particularly in the Orientalist construction of the West as a superior male Self in relation to an Eastern Other figured as female, fecund, irrational, emasculated, and sexually transgressive, with all these labels signifying uncivilized, inferior, and in need of rescue and governance. Unveiling Desire deconstructs this cluster of colonizing oppositions, whether their focus is the female body and womens sexuality or they are manifest as Orientalism. In so doing, the book counters Orientalism in Western feminismstereotyping and objectifying Eastern womens oppression and imposing foreign solutions to itwhich is ongoing despite some Western practitioners recognition of the problem and their attempts to resist it. Thus Unveiling Desire contributes to developing feminist transnational, anti-imperialist conversations about literature, film, cultural production, and critical theory that are mediated not by imperialist asymmetries but, as scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughod, Joan Scott, Sara Mills, Ella Shohat, and Robert Stam advocate, by acknowledging womens common suffering and embracing our sexuality in order to fashion mutually beneficial, equitable partnerships, alliances, coalitions, and collaborations.