South Asia Center program will explore conceptualizations of gender in modern day South Asia

South Asia Center program will explore conceptualizations of gender in modern day South AsiaMarch 24, 2001Kelly Homan Rodoskikahoman@syr.edu

The South Asia Center at The Maxwell School of Syracuse University will host “Gender, Globalization and Representation in South Asia,” a one-day, intensive workshop addressing ideas and issues around conceptualizations of gender in South Asia today, on March 31. The event will begin at 8:45 a.m. in the Global Collaboratory, Room 060 of Eggers Hall, and conclude at 5:30 p.m. A series of international speakers will discuss ways in which global communications and transnational cultural flows are affecting everyday life in even the most remote regions of the Asian subcontinent. At stake are often highly contested notions about gender and identity, as both men and women respond to and select from the “cultural supermarket” of images and ideas presented to them. Invited speakers include: ? Tej K. Bhatia, professor of linguistics and South Asian languages in SU’s College of Arts and Sciences, who will examine the depiction and targeting of women in advertising in rural India; ? Tejaswini Ganti, minority-scholar-in-residence at the Department of Anthropology of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, who will discuss how the Mumbai film industry imagines and classifies its audiences, both within and outside of India, and what impact satellite TV has had on these imaginings; ? Kajri Jain of the University of Sydney and a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, who will speak on the increasing muscularity of male divinities in the recent imagery of Hindutva and the changing symbolic complex around muscularity, masculinity and power; ? David Lelyveld, executive director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University, who will examine the world of Indian films as a self-referring reality and the ways that audiences connect films with their lives; ? Monika Mehta, doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, whose paper will problematize both the commodification of the female body in the capitalist market and the repression of female sexuality in the name of Indian tradition; and

? Jyoti Puri, assistant professor of sociology at Simmons College, who will theorize the construct of gender within a transnational framework. The workshop is co-sponsored by SU’s South Asia Center and the South Asia Program at Cornell University, and is free and open to the public. A complete workshop program and more information about the speakers can be found on the Web at http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/southasiacenter/ggr/