Kipling's famine-romance: masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in “William the Conqueror”

This essay concentrates on one of Kipling’s short-stories, ‘William the Conqueror’, first published in an American women’s magazine, and speculates on how a female audience might have caused Kipling to modify his (conventional) depiction of Anglo-Indian gender-relations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work and reviewing the history of colonial famine-relief, I suggest that the formal conjunction of the romance genre with the unusual setting of a famine-relief camp is the key to Kipling’s ‘gender-transactions’ in this story, and can be read as an indicator of the ‘biopolitical’ logic of the camp as a space of sovereign exception

Alimentaçao e codificacao social. Mulheres, cozinha e estatuto

This article is grounded on a long-term fieldwork carried out in rural India (Gujarat) with a group of Dalit women (the term for which are designated the "old" untouchables of India) and, by extension, with women from other social groups. I intend to analyze how food production, distribution, and cooking operate both as a form of segregation and of women's assertion of power, particularly in situations related to fertility.by Rosa Maria Pere