Ruth Vanita
Biographic Data
| ID | 239271 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ruth Vanita |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ruth |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanita |
| SIGNATURE | VANITA R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Montana |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9268-4651 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varṇa, and Species — A Reply to Simon Brodbeck
‘The More You Think of It, the Less the Difference’: Rebirth and Animals in Thoreau and Tagore
LGBTQ and Hinduism
This entry deals with the period from the late 20th century to the present, during which LGBTQ movements developed. For earlier periods, including Hindu scriptures, legal, medical, and erotic treatises, literature, and art, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Homoeroticism in Hinduism. The majority of LGBTQ Hindus live in India and Nepal; there are also many, belonging to various ethnicities, in other countries. Some LGBTQ Hindus ident…
Homoeroticism in Hinduism
Homoeroticism is represented in Hindu texts from the epic period (c. 500 bce–200 ce) onward. Same-sex relations are explicitly depicted in temple sculptures in the first millennium ce and discussed in legal, medical, and erotic treatises from the 1st century bce onward, in tones varying from somewhat disapproving and dispassionate to humorous and pragmatic. More frequently, close same-sex friendships that last a lifetime and that rival cross-sex …
Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society
Queering India is the first book to provide an understanding of same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society. The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected topic. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India. Specifically, the essays cov…
The Romance of Siblinghood in Bombay Cinema
Bombay cinema endows non-sexual relationships, such as friendship and siblinghood, with a passionate intensity that equals that of sexual relationships, thus resisting a complete takeover of the emotional realm by heterosexual coupledom. Choosing sibling, friend or community over a spouse need not be seen only as retrogressive self-sacrifice; it can also be seen as choosing stronger, longer-standing relationships over newer, more flimsy ones. Fil…
Playing the Field
Forum: Lesbian Generations 365 they were mixing up the terms, and it was not clear when lesbian as an identity (or shorthand for community) became useful to them. In the end, it was unclear under what conditions the term lesbian was deployed, but I do know that it was deployed. And I do know that a lot of people contributed to its deployment and thus played a role in les bian history per se. And while I really wanted to be able to historicize the…
Full of God: Ashtavakra and Ideas of Justice in Hindu Texts
The paper examines how ideas about disability, sexuality, gender, desire and aversion, have circulated in Hindu texts through the figure of the disabled sage Ashtavakra. In the Mahabharata, Ashtavakra learns from a woman teacher that no one is immune to desire. The Ashtavakra Gita explicitly states that a wise person sees no difference between man and woman. Two medieval devotional texts, which tell the story of a child born to two women who have…
Plato, Wilde, and Woolf: The Poetics of Homoerotic “Intercourse” in A Room of One's Own
This article places Woolf in the context of homoerotic literary ancestry. It suggests that the overall argument in A Room of One's Own owes a debt to Wilde's 1891 pamphlet The Soul of Man under Socialism. It also examines Woolf's controversial meditation on male-female collaboration and intercourse in A Room, and suggests a homoerotic reading of this meditation, drawing on images and ideas of literary transmission and creation from Plato's Sympos…
Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism
This volume makes available for the first time in English the work of a significant Indian nationalist author, Pandey Bechan Sharma, better known in India as 'Ugra' ('Extreme'). His book Chocolate, a 1927 collection of eight stories, was the first work of Hindi fiction to focus on male same-sex relations, and its publication sparked India's first public debates about homosexuality. Many prominent figures, including Gandhi, weighed in on the debat…
Same-Sex Weddings, Hindu Traditions and Modern India
This article examines the phenomenon of same-sex unions, both joint suicides and weddings, mostly among young, low-income, non-English speaking women, that have been reported from many parts of India over the last three decades. Most of the women were Hindus and many of the weddings took place by Hindu rites. None of these women had contact with any LGBT or women's movement or activists before their weddings. Ancient as well as modern texts show …
Lesbian Studies and Activism in India
This essay surveys public debates and writings about lesbianism and the history of activism around lesbian issues in twentieth-century India. Weddings between women and joint suicides by female couples over the last twenty-five years are among the under-researched, but increasingly reported, phenomena that suggest future directions that activism and the study of lesbianism in India may take
Love's Rite
This is the first book to examine the same-sex weddings and same-sex couple suicides reported in India over the last two decades. Ruth Vanita examines these cases in the context of a wide variety of s
Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West
Born of Two Vaginas
Research Article| October 01 2005 BORN OF TWO VAGINAS: Love and Reproduction between Co-Wives in Some Medieval Indian Texts Ruth Vanita Ruth Vanita Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2005) 11 (4): 547–577. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11-4-547 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ruth Vanita; BORN OF TWO VAGINAS: Love and Reproduction between Co-Wives in…
Wedding of Two Souls: Same-Sex Marriage and Hindu Traditions
In 2000, I married my partner, a Jewish American woman, New York with Jewish and Hindu ceremonies. The following month we held a wedding reception New Delhi. The rabbi who conducted the Jewish ceremony said that we were married in the eyes of God and of all enlightened people. Whether or not a government recognizes same-sex marriage, and however a government chooses to define marriage, no government can tell people whom to love nor can it exert e…
Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor
The Self Is Not Gendered: Sulabha's Debate with King Janaka
This essay highlights the debate on women and gender in ancient Indian texts. Neither the popular nor the scholarly debate in modern India has paid sufficient attention to unmarried learned women in ancient Hindu texts. I examine the recurrent figure of Sulabha, a single woman and an intellectual-renunciant; I focus on her debate with philosopher-king Janaka in the epic Mahabharata. When Janaka uses anti-women arguments to critique Sulabha's unco…
Tracking ‘Same–Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia
This essay focuses on the anthology Same–Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Unlike many other recently published, celebratory ‘gay anthologies’, this book contributes to ongoing scholarly work on specific same–sex erotic practices and relations in historical and cultural context. We examine issues relevant to this anthology and other such projects: the use of ‘love’ and ‘same–s…
Gandhi's tiger: Multilingual elites, the battle for minds, and English Romantic literature in colonial India
(2002). Gandhi's tiger: Multilingual elites, the battle for minds, and English Romantic literature in colonial India. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 95-110
The Kamasutra in the Twentieth Century
Until Alain Danielou's 1995 translation, published in the United States, Sir Richard Burton's 1883 version was the only widely known English version of the Kamasutra.1 Burton's version is not only inadequate (it omits many sections, misreads others, and condenses most parts) but also skewed by his tendency to exoticize Asian sexuality as more "primitive" than European sexuality.2
The Kamasutra in the Twentieth Century
Until Alain Danielou's 1995 translation, published in the United States, Sir Richard Burton's 1883 version was the only widely known English version of the Kamasutra.1 Burton's version is not only inadequate (it omits many sections, misreads others, and condenses most parts) but also skewed by his tendency to exoticize Asian sexuality as more "primitive" than European sexuality.2KeywordsHomosexual ActivitySexual FreedomIndia TodayConjugal LoveAsi…
Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature
Same-Sex Love in India presents a stunning array of writings on same-sex love from over 2000 years of Indian literature. Translated from more than a dozen languages and drawn from Hindu, Buddhist, Mus
Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History
The Rewards of Lesbian History
Peer Reviewed
Same-Sex Weddings, Hindu Traditions and Modern India
This article examines the phenomenon of same-sex unions, both joint suicides and weddings, mostly among young, low-income, non-English speaking women, that have been reported from many parts of India over the last three decades. Most of the women were Hindus and many of the weddings took place by Hindu rites. None of these women had contact with any LGBT or women's movement or activists before their weddings. Ancient as well as modern texts show …
Born of Two Vaginas
Research Article| October 01 2005 BORN OF TWO VAGINAS: Love and Reproduction between Co-Wives in Some Medieval Indian Texts Ruth Vanita Ruth Vanita Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2005) 11 (4): 547–577. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11-4-547 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ruth Vanita; BORN OF TWO VAGINAS: Love and Reproduction between Co-Wives in…
Wedding of Two Souls: Same-Sex Marriage and Hindu Traditions
In 2000, I married my partner, a Jewish American woman, New York with Jewish and Hindu ceremonies. The following month we held a wedding reception New Delhi. The rabbi who conducted the Jewish ceremony said that we were married in the eyes of God and of all enlightened people. Whether or not a government recognizes same-sex marriage, and however a government chooses to define marriage, no government can tell people whom to love nor can it exert e…
Playing the Field
Forum: Lesbian Generations 365 they were mixing up the terms, and it was not clear when lesbian as an identity (or shorthand for community) became useful to them. In the end, it was unclear under what conditions the term lesbian was deployed, but I do know that it was deployed. And I do know that a lot of people contributed to its deployment and thus played a role in les bian history per se. And while I really wanted to be able to historicize the…
Tracking ‘Same–Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia
This essay focuses on the anthology Same–Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Unlike many other recently published, celebratory ‘gay anthologies’, this book contributes to ongoing scholarly work on specific same–sex erotic practices and relations in historical and cultural context. We examine issues relevant to this anthology and other such projects: the use of ‘love’ and ‘same–s…
Gandhi's tiger: Multilingual elites, the battle for minds, and English Romantic literature in colonial India
(2002). Gandhi's tiger: Multilingual elites, the battle for minds, and English Romantic literature in colonial India. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 95-110
The burning of Roop Kanwar
In Search of Answers: Indian Women's Voices from Manushi
The burning of Roop Kanwar
Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination
This work looks at the legacy of love between women in the English canon from romantic to postcolonial literature. It examines layers of homoeroticism in works by male and female authors, and demonstrates the place of lesbian desire in the Western literary imagination
The Rewards of Lesbian History
Peer Reviewed
The Kamasutra in the Twentieth Century
Until Alain Danielou's 1995 translation, published in the United States, Sir Richard Burton's 1883 version was the only widely known English version of the Kamasutra.1 Burton's version is not only inadequate (it omits many sections, misreads others, and condenses most parts) but also skewed by his tendency to exoticize Asian sexuality as more "primitive" than European sexuality.2
The Kamasutra in the Twentieth Century
Until Alain Danielou's 1995 translation, published in the United States, Sir Richard Burton's 1883 version was the only widely known English version of the Kamasutra.1 Burton's version is not only inadequate (it omits many sections, misreads others, and condenses most parts) but also skewed by his tendency to exoticize Asian sexuality as more "primitive" than European sexuality.2KeywordsHomosexual ActivitySexual FreedomIndia TodayConjugal LoveAsi…
Same-Sex Love in India: Readings in Indian Literature
Same-Sex Love in India presents a stunning array of writings on same-sex love from over 2000 years of Indian literature. Translated from more than a dozen languages and drawn from Hindu, Buddhist, Mus
Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History
Tracking ‘Same–Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia
This essay focuses on the anthology Same–Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (2000), edited by Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai. Unlike many other recently published, celebratory ‘gay anthologies’, this book contributes to ongoing scholarly work on specific same–sex erotic practices and relations in historical and cultural context. We examine issues relevant to this anthology and other such projects: the use of ‘love’ and ‘same–s…
Gandhi's tiger: Multilingual elites, the battle for minds, and English Romantic literature in colonial India
(2002). Gandhi's tiger: Multilingual elites, the battle for minds, and English Romantic literature in colonial India. Postcolonial Studies: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 95-110
Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor
The Self Is Not Gendered: Sulabha's Debate with King Janaka
This essay highlights the debate on women and gender in ancient Indian texts. Neither the popular nor the scholarly debate in modern India has paid sufficient attention to unmarried learned women in ancient Hindu texts. I examine the recurrent figure of Sulabha, a single woman and an intellectual-renunciant; I focus on her debate with philosopher-king Janaka in the epic Mahabharata. When Janaka uses anti-women arguments to critique Sulabha's unco…
Wedding of Two Souls: Same-Sex Marriage and Hindu Traditions
In 2000, I married my partner, a Jewish American woman, New York with Jewish and Hindu ceremonies. The following month we held a wedding reception New Delhi. The rabbi who conducted the Jewish ceremony said that we were married in the eyes of God and of all enlightened people. Whether or not a government recognizes same-sex marriage, and however a government chooses to define marriage, no government can tell people whom to love nor can it exert e…
Love's Rite
This is the first book to examine the same-sex weddings and same-sex couple suicides reported in India over the last two decades. Ruth Vanita examines these cases in the context of a wide variety of s
Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West
Born of Two Vaginas
Research Article| October 01 2005 BORN OF TWO VAGINAS: Love and Reproduction between Co-Wives in Some Medieval Indian Texts Ruth Vanita Ruth Vanita Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2005) 11 (4): 547–577. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-11-4-547 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ruth Vanita; BORN OF TWO VAGINAS: Love and Reproduction between Co-Wives in…
Lesbian Studies and Activism in India
This essay surveys public debates and writings about lesbianism and the history of activism around lesbian issues in twentieth-century India. Weddings between women and joint suicides by female couples over the last twenty-five years are among the under-researched, but increasingly reported, phenomena that suggest future directions that activism and the study of lesbianism in India may take
Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism
This volume makes available for the first time in English the work of a significant Indian nationalist author, Pandey Bechan Sharma, better known in India as 'Ugra' ('Extreme'). His book Chocolate, a 1927 collection of eight stories, was the first work of Hindi fiction to focus on male same-sex relations, and its publication sparked India's first public debates about homosexuality. Many prominent figures, including Gandhi, weighed in on the debat…
Same-Sex Weddings, Hindu Traditions and Modern India
This article examines the phenomenon of same-sex unions, both joint suicides and weddings, mostly among young, low-income, non-English speaking women, that have been reported from many parts of India over the last three decades. Most of the women were Hindus and many of the weddings took place by Hindu rites. None of these women had contact with any LGBT or women's movement or activists before their weddings. Ancient as well as modern texts show …
Full of God: Ashtavakra and Ideas of Justice in Hindu Texts
The paper examines how ideas about disability, sexuality, gender, desire and aversion, have circulated in Hindu texts through the figure of the disabled sage Ashtavakra. In the Mahabharata, Ashtavakra learns from a woman teacher that no one is immune to desire. The Ashtavakra Gita explicitly states that a wise person sees no difference between man and woman. Two medieval devotional texts, which tell the story of a child born to two women who have…
Plato, Wilde, and Woolf: The Poetics of Homoerotic “Intercourse” in A Room of One's Own
This article places Woolf in the context of homoerotic literary ancestry. It suggests that the overall argument in A Room of One's Own owes a debt to Wilde's 1891 pamphlet The Soul of Man under Socialism. It also examines Woolf's controversial meditation on male-female collaboration and intercourse in A Room, and suggests a homoerotic reading of this meditation, drawing on images and ideas of literary transmission and creation from Plato's Sympos…
Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society
Queering India is the first book to provide an understanding of same-sex love and eroticism in Indian culture and society. The essays focus on pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial gay and lesbian life in India to provide a comprehensive look at a much neglected topic. The topics are wide-ranging, considering film, literature, popular culture, historical and religious texts, law and other aspects of life in India. Specifically, the essays cov…
The Romance of Siblinghood in Bombay Cinema
Bombay cinema endows non-sexual relationships, such as friendship and siblinghood, with a passionate intensity that equals that of sexual relationships, thus resisting a complete takeover of the emotional realm by heterosexual coupledom. Choosing sibling, friend or community over a spouse need not be seen only as retrogressive self-sacrifice; it can also be seen as choosing stronger, longer-standing relationships over newer, more flimsy ones. Fil…
Playing the Field
Forum: Lesbian Generations 365 they were mixing up the terms, and it was not clear when lesbian as an identity (or shorthand for community) became useful to them. In the end, it was unclear under what conditions the term lesbian was deployed, but I do know that it was deployed. And I do know that a lot of people contributed to its deployment and thus played a role in les bian history per se. And while I really wanted to be able to historicize the…
Homoeroticism in Hinduism
Homoeroticism is represented in Hindu texts from the epic period (c. 500 bce–200 ce) onward. Same-sex relations are explicitly depicted in temple sculptures in the first millennium ce and discussed in legal, medical, and erotic treatises from the 1st century bce onward, in tones varying from somewhat disapproving and dispassionate to humorous and pragmatic. More frequently, close same-sex friendships that last a lifetime and that rival cross-sex …
Sociology (20 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Art (15 works) · History (14 works) · Literature (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (10 works) · Hinduism (8 works) · Religious studies (8 works)