PROBING THE PROBLEMATICS OF GENDER AND SEXUALITY: AN INTERCULTURAL APPROACH TO CRITICAL DISCOURSES ON BODY IN THE COLONIAL BENGALI MAGAZINE NARA-NAREE.

The construction of body in India is an ambiguous discursive process and this paper attempts to answer the following key questions clinched in the colonial monthly Bengali magazine Nara-Naree[Man-Woman]: What was the relationship of knowledge, power and sexuality among genders in colonial India? How was gender difference constituted in colonial Bengal? How did cloth define the disparity between nature and culture? How were the objects of consciousness regarding genders developed in social contexts? How did the surveillance and control over the body construct the "ideal sexual behavior"? How were the paradigms of health, psychology, nature, culture, science, morality, modernity, tradition and history integrated into the gender framework which assert the reconstruction of femininities, masculinities and sexualities? How did the rhetoric of body and sexuality in colonial Bengal become contested site of discourses as well as a device to construct a national and cultural identity? How did body become a tool of control and a territory for inscribing critical observations, the content to be evaluated and a device to reform the structure and boundary between imperial and national binaries? How did the subcultures and trans gender identities form new sexual attitudes subverting the homogeneous and hegemonic hierarchy in the east-west relations and transnational settings? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]