Editorial: Reviews – ULR Issue 12, Gender & Its Discontents

Greetings dear readers!

Welcome to the Reviews Section of Usawa’s December 2024 Issue, based around the theme, ‘Gender and its Discontents’. 

      While conceptualising this issue in May/Jun 24, we hadn’t foreseen that gender-related issues will once again take centre-stage in our social, political, and cultural conscience. And yet! Here we are. France grapples with the horrific revelations of the Gisele Pelicot rape case; the perpetrators of the gruesome rape of a medical student in Kolkata in August 2024 are still at large; and Donald Trump’s election has once again cast a shadow of uncertainty on the future of abortion laws in the United States. And so it goes!

      In this subsection, we have attempted to initiate discussions about gender through the platform of some very intriguing books. Nandini Bhatia, in her review of Anita Desai’s much awaited novel, Rosarita, illuminates the gap between womanhood and motherhood through the lens of an uneasy mother-daughter relationship, as also through the uncertain troupe of memory. Read the review here.

      Sneha Biswas’s review of Patricia Gherovici’s Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference, did, I accede, stump us. Most literary magazines stay away from publishing reviews of academic books. However, Biswas in her review, lucidly brings out the many nuances of how Gherovici reads sexual difference (if there is at all such a thing!) from the lens of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Read the review here.

      Our regular contributor, Aditi Yadav reviews Dolki Min’s novel, Walking Practice. The protagonist of the novel [spoiler alert] is a shape-shifting, gender non-binary alien who can change his/her gender based on who they are hooking up with (among other factors). Read the review here.  

      Sowmiya Rajamohan’s review of Mieri Hiranshi’s The Girl that Can’t Get a Girlfriend, marks the first time we have published a review of a graphic novel. In her review, Rajamohan not only delves upon the plot of the novel, and the quirky antics of its young, lesbian protagonist (reminiscent of protagonist, Anamika Sharma from Abha Dawesar’s novel, Babyji {2005}), but also on its visual imagery, which “complements the story perfectly”. Read the review here. 

      And finally, we have Kritika Narula’s nuanced review of Urvashi Bahuguna’s acclaimed book of essays on mental health, No Straight Thing was Ever Made, wherein Narula candidly reflects upon the many important facets of this book which, we feel, need continuous emphasis in the world we are living in. Read the review here.

Hope you enjoy this issue.

Happy reading,
Warmly, 

Ankush
Reviews Editor
Usawa Literary Review