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ABSTRACTS
SESSION VII:
WOMEN, ASCETICISM, AND SEXUALITY
Fruitful
Austerity: Embodied Devotion in Hindu Women's Vrata Performances
Tracy Pintchman, Loyola University Chicago
 This paper
examines the role of embodiment, and of embodied devotion, in Hindu
women’s vratas, or votive rituals. In this paper I propose to
interrogate the practice of Hindu women's vratas themselves in
relation to the religious management and regulation of householder
women's bodies. Drawing on field research, I focus on one particular
vrata, Dala Chath or Surya Sasthi, as it is performed in the city of
Varanasi in North India. The paper argues that vratas like the Dala
Chath vrata function as a performative field in which religiously
managed models of the householder's body come together with unique
salience. In particular, I analyze three paradigms of the
religiously regulated body that emerge in the performance of this
vrata: the fertile body, the ascetic body, and the devotional body.
With respect to the fertile body, in contemporary votive practices
the fertility of women's bodies, much more than that of men's
bodies, is posited as in need of religious management. Among the
women and men I encountered during my field research in Varanasi,
human fertility and infertility tended generally to be viewed as
primarily, if not exclusively, female concerns, not male ones. The
paradigm through which fertility comes to be regulated in vratas
like the Dala Chath vrata is ascetic action, which is conscripted in
such contexts into serving domestic bodies and domestic ends. Hence
the religious management of fertility presumes splitting fertility
from sexuality (kama) and reconstituting it as a domain of ascetic
practice (tapas) to be managed through bodily religious
performance. Finally, in this vrata both fertility and asceticism
are put in the service of bhakti to Surya, who functions as divine
witness to the women's religious management of their bodies and,
ideally, responds by participating in the process of transforming
infertile bodies into fertile ones.
In her analysis of
women's vratas, Susan Wadley notes that austerities normally
associated with vratas, such as fasting and sleeping on the floor,
function as signals of one's faith and devotion, and the assumption
is that "the deity will reward this faith and service with some kind
of boon" (Wadley 1983: 149). I suggest that in practices like the
Dala Chath vrata, acts of austerity function not only as signals of
one's bhakti but also as mechanisms of transformation that depend on
the active bodily agency—not simply passive receptivity—of the
devotional participant. In the performance of the Dala Chath vrata,
the votary becomes an active participant in any transformation that
occurs through and because of her bodily engagement.
Regulating Women’s
Bodies in Indian Buddhist Canonical Literature
Carol
Anderson, Kalamazoo College
 One of the central
issues in sexuality within South Asian religions is the variety of
terms found in early Indian texts that refer to sexually
non-normative individuals, both female and male. The Vinayapitaka
of the Buddhist Pāli Canon contains a list of terms that monks
should not use when referring to women, and that list is comprised
of medically documented abnormal conditions that afflict
biologically sexed women. This list of ten terms has been dismissed
by Janet Gyatso as irrelevant—if not illogical—to discussions of
bodies and sexualities. This paper, on the other hand, follows this
term throughout the Pāli Canon, and explores how women’s bodies were
defined by the use of this list of disorders. Women who were
afflicted by these maladies, which include a variety of types of
menstrual disorders and abnormal genitalia, were prevented from
becoming nuns. Also in this list is a term that has been translated
as a 'female' human who is somehow “atypically effeminate” (itthipandaka)
that has puzzled scholars. This list of abnormalities leads us into
questions about how bodies—both male and female—were conceptualized,
defined, and thus regulated within monastic Buddhist orders. The
presence of the term itthipandaka in this list of abnormal
types of women intersects with recent scholarship on third sex and
third genders because of the word pandaka, which this paper
takes up in the conclusion.
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