Comprehending the Bleeding Body: Epistemological Violence and (Un)Tabooing Menstruation in Selective Media Texts in India

The representation of menstruation in Indian media texts (films, short films, and advertisements) is limited. Besides the advertisement of industrially produced sanitary napkins, we hardly come across their mention. Even in cinematic spaces with female leads, the issue remains unuttered. Since the last half of the previous decade, there has been a conscious attempt to raise awareness around menstruation. Considering menstruation as a socially mediated biological process, in which bodies become sites where social constructions of differences are mapped onto human beings to inflict violence upon the subject, these works have resisted this systematic patriarchal oppression by asking an appropriate question, “which bodies are producing knowledge about which other bodies?” (Harcourt, 2009, p. 13), indicating that this assigning of impurity to menstruation through myths, taboos, and restrictions is a patriarchal construct. In many parts of India, menstruating women are not even allowed inside the kitchen or the temple. This forced isolation is indeed gender-based violence, which is driven by socio-cultural and religious beliefs compounded with gender norms. The research paper argues that by reading menstruation through the lens of body politics and in the context of media representation currently prevalent in India, it is now possible to understand and decode menstruation as a phenomenon of gendered oppression. Additionally, through these compelling narratives, it is also possible to reflect on the process by which these interventions contribute to the altering of everyday practices and their limitations. This might lead to social change by demystifying taboos around the menstrual body and showing women their situation in a way that affirms they can act to change it and reconstruct a meaningful relationship to their bodies

Film Review: Indigenous Epistemology, Media, and the Representation of Women in Kantara

Cinematic works around indigenous lives in India have long been marginalized within the scope of “film as an entertaining art form.” Striking a balance between a faithful rendition of an indigenous community and the infusion of entertainment seemed impossible within the Indian film industry until Kantara struck the silver screen. Since its release, the film has been subjected to constructive and positive criticism, but the representation of women in the film has either remained unattended to or viewed negatively. This research paper intends to approach the use of indigenous media and epistemology in the film as a symptomatic representation of fourth cinema and then to address the representation of women from the perspective of faithful representation and indigeneity

Dropleton-Soliton Crossover mediated via Trap Modulation

We report a droplet to a soliton crossover by tuning the external confinement potential in a dilute Bose-Eienstein condensate by numerically solving the modified Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The testimony of such a crossover is presented via studying the fractional density of the condensate which smoothly migrates from being a flat-head curve at weak confinement to a bright soliton at strong confinement. Such a transition occurs across a region of the potential whose strength varies over an order of magnitude and thus should be fit to be termed as a crossover. We supplement our studies via exploring the size of the bound pairs and the ramifications of the particle density therein. Eventually, all of these aid us in arriving at a phase diagram in a space defined by the trap strength and the particle number that shows the formation of two phases consisting of droplets and solitons, along with a regime of coexistence of these two.Comment: 7 Pages, 9 Figures; To appear in Physics Letters