Inscribing the Female Body: Fuzzy Gender and Goddess in a South Indian Saiva Marriage Myth

Abstract

The paper seeks to work through the heuristic device of marriage and female
sexual bodily fluids, as they are constructed within particular strands of
Hinduism. The paper applies the analytic lens of feminist Anthropology
and proceeds through the contested site of female body and probes how
the discursive body comes to be embedded within a discourse of matrimony
and reproduction. By looking at an archetypal female or Goddess within a
particular stream of Hinduism and the matrix of mythology within which
she is installed, the paper unpacks how “female” has come to be strategically
inscribed, constrained and performed upon through various religio-cultural
devices in Hinduism. As much of the performance of female gender scripts
appear to be drawn from the regulatory power of certain (male) canonized
religious texts, the paper suggests re-installing the goddess within the liminal
and interstitial space of fuzzy gender that might well allow for an alternate,
more plastic reading of marriage and motherhood, and of female.