logo
episode-header-image
Jan 2025
55m 46s

Amrita Narayanan, "Women's Sexuality and...

NEW BOOKS NETWORK
About this episode

Amrita Narayanan is a practicing Clinical Psychologist (Psy.D. 2007) and Psychoanalyst (Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 2019). She is the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023). She was the Editor of and essayist in The Parrots of Desire: 3000 years of Erotica in India (Aleph Books, 2018) a collection of poems, short prose and fiction in translation from Indian languages, linked by an introductory essay on the central themes in Indian erotic literature. She was an essayist for Pha(bu)llus: a cultural history of the Phallus (Harper Collins, 2020). Amrita is currently visiting faculty at Ashoka University where she teaches classes at the undergraduate and masters level.

Amrita's research interests are in cultural factors in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the psychodynamics of women's sexual agency, and how cultural factors shape the aesthetics of women's sexual agency. Her writing has appeared in academic journals such as Psychodynamic Practice and Psychoanalytic Review; newspapers such as The Hindu and The Indian Express; and popular press periodicals such as Outlook, Open Magazine India Today and The Deccan Herald. Amrita has received the Sudhir Kakar Prize for psychoanalytic writing, the Taylor and Francis Prize for Psychoanalytic writing, and the Homi Bhabha Fellowship.

The interviewer is Psychoanalyst and Writer, Ashis Roy, New Delhi.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

Up next
Yesterday
Myles Lennon, "Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2025)
In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, ... Show More
1h 10m
Jul 7
Joseph Darda, "Gift and Grit: Race, Sports, and the Construction of Social Debt" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
In 1998, Bill Clinton hosted a town hall on race and sports. 'If you've got a special gift,' the president said of athletes, 'you owe more back.' Gift and Grit shows how the sports industry has incubated racial ideas about advantage and social debt since the civil rights era by s ... Show More
1h 13m
Jul 6
Kelsea Best, Kayly Ober, Robert A. McLeman, "Migration and Displacement in a Changing Climate" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
This book provides insight into the impact of climate change on human mobility - including both migration and displacement - by synthesizing key concepts, research, methodology, policy, and emerging issues surrounding the topic. It illuminates the connections between climate chan ... Show More
47m 18s
Recommended Episodes
Jan 2025
Amrita Narayanan, "Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Amrita Narayanan is a practicing Clinical Psychologist (Psy.D. 2007) and Psychoanalyst (Indian Psychoanalytic Society, 2019). She is the author of Women's Sexuality and Modern India: In a Rapture of Distress (Oxford University Press, 2023). She was the Editor of and essayist in T ... Show More
55m 46s
Aug 2024
Sudhir Kakar, "The Indian Jungle: Psychoanalysis and Non-Western Civilizations" (Karnac, 2024)
In this podcast, Ashis Roy (Psychoanalyst (IPA) and author of the recently published book Intimacy in Alienation: A Psychoanalytic Study of Hindu-Muslim Relationships (Yoda Press, 2024) is in conversation with Dhwani Shah, MD. Shah is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst currently p ... Show More
55m 35s
Apr 2023
Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman. "Feminists Reclaim Mentorship" (SUNY Press, 2023)
Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same ol ... Show More
1h 16m
Dec 2023
Cristina A. Pop, "The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
In The Cancer Within: Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania (Rutgers UP, 2022), Cristina Pop examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care, especially in the post-communist contex ... Show More
1h 22m
Dec 2023
Anne E. Linton, "Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
A compelling study of medical and literary imaginations, Anne Linton's Unmaking Sex: The Gender Outlaws of Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines the complex relationship between modes of seeing, thinking, and writing intersex bodies and lives. In t ... Show More
1h 2m
Mar 2022
Nancy Chodorow - “Thoughts for the times on women and men”.
Thoreau's cove, Lake Walden, Concord, Mass., Detroit Publishing Co., publisher, between 1900 and 1910. Courtesy Library of Congress. Nancy Chodorow is Training and Supervising Analyst Emerita, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Lecturer Part-time in Psychiatry at the Ha ... Show More
15m 42s
Jul 2023
Rahil Roodsaz, "Sexual Self-Fashioning: Iranian Dutch Narratives of Sexuality and Belonging" (Berghahn Books, 2022)
Sexuality and gender have come to serve as measures for cultural belonging in discussions of the position of Muslim immigrants in multicultural Western societies. While the acceptance of assumed local norms such as sexual liberty and gender equality is seen as successful integrat ... Show More
36m 8s
Mar 2025
Hemangini Gupta, "Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India" (U California Press, 2024)
Experimental Times: Startup Capitalism and Feminist Futures in India (U California Press, 2024) is an in-depth ethnography of the transformation of Bengaluru/Bangalore from a site of "backend" IT work to an aspirational global city of enterprise and innovation. The book journeys ... Show More
41m 59s
Nov 2023
Pavitra Sundar, "Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
Pavitra Sundar's book Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema (U Michigan Press, 2023) is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities of sound in cinema. Eschewing ocularcentric and siloed disciplinary formations, the book takes seriously the radical theo ... Show More
57m 7s
Oct 2024
Helena Taylor, "Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception a ... Show More
1h 1m