Solid Lipid Nanoparticles: A Potential Approach for Dermal Drug Delivery

Solid lipid nanoparticles (SLNs) have attracted increasing attention during recent years. Due to their unique size dependent properties, lipid nanoparticles offer possibilities to develop new therapeutics. The ability to incorporate drugs into nanoparticles offers a new prototype in drug delivery thus realizing the dual goal of both controlled release and site-specific drug delivery. Drug delivery to the skin is widely used for local and systemic delivery and has potential to be improved by application of nanoparticulate formulations. If investigated appropriately, solid lipid nanoparticles may open new opportunities in therapy of complex diseases which is difficult to treat

Labour as Violence in Dalit Households: Reading Autobiographical Narratives by Dalit Women

The everyday concerns of Dalit women are frequently overlooked in discourses about the emancipation of Dalits from Brahminical hegemony in favor of issues deemed weightier, such as reform ideology, caste conflicts, and political power struggles. The micro-politics of the sexual division of labour in Dalit households, with its corrosive effects on the well-being and self-perception of Dalit women, has remained side-lined. Even when discussed with reference to caste and gender intersectionality, the labour consigned to Dalit women is spoken of in additive terms to explicate their “double oppression” or victimisation through sexual exploitation at the hands of upper caste men. In the light of these arguments, this article examines the depiction of “labouring bodies” in select autobiographical narratives by Dalit women translated into English, to enunciate the physical and psychological subjugation these women endure in the name of labour, which gets subsumed as obligation due to brahminical ideology. Taking Meena Gopal’s argument (2014) as a point of departure, that women’s domestic labour, from marginalised communities in particular, is rendered invisible and undervalued in the mechanistic distinction of the world of work into categories like formal and informal, market and domestic labour, this article attempts to render the agency and voice of these women by bringing to attention the instances where Dalit women have voiced dissent against wage disparity, abjectness and devaluation of their domestic or non-domestic labour, the burden of providing for familial food/sustenance, and the tendency of their own family and community members to deny their personhood by treating them primarily as useful machines. These issues emerge as significant sources of friction within the Dalit household. The article also examines the representation of the domestication of Dalit women in the selected texts