Towards an Ontology of Body-in-Practice: The Embodiment of Gender and Caste

Abstract

DOI: https://doi.org/10.32444/IJSW.2018.79.3.381-394

This paper studies the growing importance of the material body in re-enforcing caste and gender identities in India through a feminist analysis of body-in-practice. It borrows from the previous literary works to draw attention to the central paradoxes that arise in studying the body as a strictly biological and/or cultural representation. The first paradox relates to the translation of ‘mothering’ into a bio-technical process like in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and the second is the presumption of embodied caste in medical diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB). The paper departs from an understanding of ‘represented’ body to study the ways in which the body is lived within a spatial dimension