Sacks of Mutilated Breasts: Violence and Body Politics in South Asian Partition Literature

The partition narratives of South Asian authors are testimony to the fact that women of all ethnic and religious backgrounds were the greatest victims of the newly created border between India and Pakistan in 1947. Women’s bodies were abducted, stripped naked, raped, mutilated (their breasts cut off), carved with religious symbols and murdered to be sent in train wagons to the “other” side of the border. Taking Bapsi Sidhwa’s novel Ice Candy Man/Cracking India (1988) as a narrative example of the importance of women’s point of view and as central figures of the violent conflict, we will examine the symbol of the female breasts, following Judith Butler’s and Michel Foucault’s theories on power and governmentality, framed in the rhetoric of Mother India, as the violence inflicted upon women was equivalent to a sacrilege against one’s religion, family and country. Therefore, we will examine the passage of sacks of mutilated breasts as a terrifying testimonio about Partition history fictionally recalled, but also as a metaphor of the border crossing which threatens the stability of the nation. In the light of Julia Kristen’s theory on the abjection, we will interpret the female corpses with mutilated breasts as abjects which blur the limits of a normative society, displaying its fragility. We will conclude by asserting that the novel discussed in this paper can be read as a harsh indictment of both a violent de/colonial process and local misogynist corruption (lessons from History) as well as a weapon of feminist resistance (doing Herstory). Women’s mutilated bodies are uncovered by authors such as Bapsi Sidhwa in order to expose the tragedy and trauma so that the history/body dialectic (a tale of the violation of women’s rights) can be, as a consequence, also uncovered

Postcolonial Feminism: Teaching how to avoid prejudices about Muslim women in an ESL classroom

La finalidad de este trabajo es proponer una serie de actividades encaminadas a que el alumnado de segundo curso de Bachillerato, mientras se realiza el proceso enseñanza-aprendizaje en lengua inglesa, sea capaz de identificar y desmantelar estereotipos sobre las mujeres musulmanas. Este trabajo está encabezado por una breve historia de la tercera ola del feminismo, el denominado feminismo poscolonial, para terminar mencionando las múltiples respuestas que ofrece el feminismo musulmánThe purpose of this piece is to propose English activities addressed to students in second year of Bachillerato with the objective of learning how to identify and dismantle stereotypes about Muslim women. The paper is introduced by a brief history of the third wave of feminism, that is, postcolonial feminism, including the multiple responses of Muslim feminism

Sex Between Women and Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies

In her essay, Sex Between Women and Indianness: Vulnerable Casted Bodies, Antonia Navarro-Tejero examines the lesbian experience, using two heterosexual voices representing the lesbian abject: Shobha Dé’s popular bestseller novel Strange Obsession (1992) and Karan Razdan’s Bollywood film Girlfriend (2004), as they espouse the dominant ideology of heteronormativity, rendering homosexuality as a western illness that taints the Indian culture. First, the author provides an overview of the history of lesbian desire in India, and how it is rendered by Hindu nationalists. Then, following the postulates of Michel Foucault, she analyzes both cultural texts with respect to how same-sex desire is represented in relation to religious morality. Both works deploy, and manipulate for dramatic effect, a repertoire of visual/textual stereotypes that have long been associated in misogynist and patriarchal imagination with perceptions of lesbian (Christian) women as sexually abject and heterosexual (Hindu) partners as victims of their insanity. She concludes that, because women’s sexuality is deployed in the services of reproducing the nation, lesbianism symbolizes a threat to the Hindu family

Bodies in Labor Transiting through Colonial Indian History

This paper offers an account of my three year contribution to the Research Project “Bodies in Transit” (ref. FF1201347789C21P) funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Regional Development Fund. It focuses on the history of the medicalization of childbirth during the British Raj in India, how birth and delivery were stolen from indigenous midwives (dais) and how hospitalization became desirable among the Indian elite. Furthermore, it discusses not only how the traditional birth assistants were represented by the colonial mission of the British Empire in the 19th century but also how American second wave feminism in the 20th century represented traditional midwives as “the Third World Other,” through two wellknown authors: Rudyard Kipling and Katherine Mayo. In order to unravel the mechanisms of this internalized obstetric violence in India, we make use of the theories promulgated by the Spivak, Mohanty, and Foucault, in order to demonstrate that not only motherhood, but also the rite which converts women into mothers, have been manipulated by powe

Improvement of fire reaction and mould growth resistance of a new bio-based thermal insulation material

In the present paper, the performance of an innovative thermal insulation rigid board is evaluated in terms of fire behaviour and fungal resistance. The board is based on vegetal pith and a natural gum (corn pith and sodium alginate) and it is completely compostable. This new composite was developed in previous work. Here boric acid, aluminium hydroxide and ammonium polyphosphate are used as fire retardants and montan wax, acetic acid and lactic acid are used as water repellent and fungicides respectively. Interactions between these different treatments is investigated. Both flaming and smouldering combustion processes of the different formulations are evaluated by small-scale techniques which include pyrolysis microcalorimetry and thermogravimetric analysis. A medium-scale device is also designed in order to study the impact of the different additives to the smouldering kinetics. Fire behaviour tests show that good improvement is obtained, both in flaming and smouldering combustion when boric acid is added. Although smouldering is not avoided in any case, the addition of 8% of boric acid or aluminium hydroxide slows down the speed of combustion propagation. The effect of the different additives on the moisture content and mould growth at 97% RH and 27 °C is analysed. Under such severe conditions none of the additives is able to prevent mould growth, with the exception of boric acid. None or marginal mould growth was observed on samples containing 8% of boric acid although moisture content was higher than the other cases.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Neurodidactics of Languages: Neuromyths in Multilingual Learners

From the perspective of neuroscience applied to education and the teaching of foreign languages, this exploratory study analyzes the beliefs and conceptions about the functioning of the brain and language learning in students enrolled in Education degrees at the Melilla campus of the University of Granada. The sample consisted of 397 participants. The data collection was carried out by means of a questionnaire designed for this purpose, consisting of questions related to the context and linguistic background of the respondents and to educational neuromyths regarding language learning. The data were analyzed using the SPSS version 27 statistical software, and univariate and bivariate analyses were carried out according to the three grouping dimensions: (a) brain functioning, (b) multiple intelligences and learning styles, and (c) language learning. The results indicate the prevalence of neuromyths related to general concepts, which determine the learning comprehension. This corroborates the findings of research studies in other contexts. Although the participants do not show a prevalence of neuromyths regarding foreign language learning, presumably due to their experiences in multilingual contexts, which constitutes the main contribution of this study

The Representation of the Lesbian Body in Contemporary Indian Popular Culture

En este ensayo, analizamos la representación del cuerpo lésbico en dos textos culturales de la cultura popular contemporánea de la India: la novel Strange Obsession de Shobha Dé (1992) y la película de Bollywood Girldfriend de Karan Razdan (2004). Argumentamos que, en lugar de desafiar los modos hegemónicos de la representación de las mujeres lesbianas, ambas obras despliegan y manipulan con efecto dramático un repertorio de estereotipos visuales y textuales que se han asociado con percepciones misóginas y patriarcales de las mujeres lesbianas como abyectas sexuales y sus parejas heterosexuales como víctimas de su locura.In this essay, we examine the representation of the lesbian body in two contemporary Indian pop cultural products: Shobha Dé’s bestseller novel Strange Obsession (1992) and Karan Razdan’s Bollywood film Girlfriend (2004). We argue that rather than challenging and undermining the hegemonic modes of representation of lesbian women, both works deploy, and manipulate for dramatic effect, a repertoire of visual/textual stereotypes that have long been associated in misogynist and patriarchal imagination with perceptions of lesbian women as sexual abjects and heterosexual partners as victims of their insanity

Antonia Navarro Rincón, L’enseignement des langues aux sourds. Étude de programmes en Espagne et en France (XVIIe-XXe siècles), Thèse de doctorat réalisée sous la direction de María Eugenia Fernández Fraile et de Javier Suso López, soutenue le 12 décembre 2011 au Département de Didactique de la Langue et de la Littérature de l’Université de Grenade (publiée en 2012, 655 pages. ISBN 978-84-695-1021-6, D.L. GR 1166-2012).

La thèse adopte une orientation ouvertement diachronique, didactique et contrastive pour retracer, à partir de programmes représentatifs, l’évolution de l’enseignement des langues dans l’éducation des personnes sourdes, en Espagne et en France, du XVIIe auXXesiècle, en se basant sur une conception qui intègre ces utilisateurs dans le domaine de la didactique des langues et des cultures. La recherche menée a mis en évidence aussi bien l’idiosyncrasie des cas du corpus dans leurs ancrages conte..

Gender without borders: an interview with C.S. Lakshmi (Ambai)

Intervie