The Doctor and Mrs. A. by Sarah Pinto
In the years leading up to India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman, ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new method of dream analysis. “Mrs A.’s” analysis included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements, envisioning a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book is an exploration of their conversation, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways Mrs. A. put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a concept of “counter-ethics”. Following Mrs. A. in pursuing mythic narratives, and turning in its conclusion to art as a guide for theorizing ethics, this book asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic and its orientation toward movement and change.
Sarah Pinto is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of two books on the gendering of medical practice in contemporary India: Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (Penn, 2014, winner of the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize) and Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural North India (Berghahn 2008). With Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, and Byron Good, she coedited Postcolonial Disorders (California, 2008).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780823286676 |
| ISBN 10 | 0823286673 |
| Title | The Doctor and Mrs. A. |
| Author | Sarah Pinto |
| Series | Thinking From Elsewhere |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Fordham University Press |
| Year published | 2019-11-05 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |