Maria Angel

Digitising Ariadne’s Thread: feminism, exscryption, and the unfolding of memory in digital spaces

Working against the instantaneity of the hyperlink, new forms of feminist praxis work with movement and the unfolding of new networked and digital spaces which remake histories of women’s work. In this paper we introduce the concept of feminist exscryption to characterise the kind of performativity which refuses the evaporation of sexual difference and which draws on the lived materiality of bodies and their insertion back into the network.

Material Feminisms edited by Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman

conservative critics of Hindu social mores, employed orientalist discourses in discussing the lot of Indian womanhood. Chapters on women’s education, the home, the age of consent controversy, gender and nationalism, and the female body and self complete the volume. In the essay on the body, Kosambi argues for a conflicted body-self relationship in women’s lives. A young woman had to identify herself totally with the wife-mother role, that is her reproductive function, but as a widow needed to deny her body completely: her hair was shorn, she was clad in a ‘dull maroon sari’ and was obliged ‘to observe a regimen of physical austerities’ (136). The volume makes important contributions to feminist historiography. Kosambi interrogates the notion of a public private dichotomy that has grown within Western feminist historiography, and disputes its explanatory power for studies of Maharashtrian society in both pre-colonial and colonial times. She argues for a more complex figuring. She also contests the dichotomy of ‘home’ and ‘outside’ developed by Partha Chatterjee in his studies of colonial Bengal. She challenges received histories of nationalism in Maharashtrian society, which represent social reforms among upper castes ‘as a male achievement . . . for the benefit of passive women recipients’ (11 12). Rather, Kosambi reinstates these women as agents, exploring their ‘articulations of female subjectivity’ (33) while delineating the different and still limiting thresholds that the male reformers prescribed for women. Margaret Allen Gender, Work and Social Inquiry University of Adelaide margaret.allen@adelaide.edu.au # 2009 Margaret Allen