UNU-GEST Lecture Series on 4 February - Twice Abused Bodies and the Question of Agency

The UNU-GEST Spring 2016 Lecture Series continues and on 4 February at 12:00 at the University of Iceland main building (room 52), Dr. Giti Chandra will give her talk titled Twice Abused Bodies and the Question of Agency. Dr. Giti Chandra is Associate Professor at the Dept of English, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi in India and part-time lecturer at UNU-GEST.In her lecture, Dr. Chandra will discuss the ways in which women’s bodies are inscribed in cultures across the globe, which make certain kinds of violence against those bodies imaginable and possible. It interrogates several literary texts which use the ‘violenced’ body in symbolic ways to figure forth situations of conflict and their possible futures. It argues that these texts reinscribe the woman’s body in the service of fiction, in a literary attempt to ascribe agency where none seems possible. The paper then looks at theories of pain, articulation, violence, and collective identities, in order to formulate an understanding of how  this happens in spite of the overarching political views of the author, and confronts the nature of agency constructed through these means.  

The lecture is given in English and admission is free. Moderator is Professor Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir. The event on Facebook.

The UNU-GEST Spring 2016 Lecture Series is held in collaboration with RIKK - Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference at the University of Iceland and the National Museum of Iceland.

 Dr. Chandra has taught in and been a fellow at Rutgers University, New Jersey, from where she received her Ph.D on women and violence. She served as Chairperson of the College Complaints Committee Against Sexual Harassment in St Stephen’s College, and as Adviser to the Gender Sensitization Committee, and is a member of the Gender Forum of Delhi University. She is currently the External Expert on the Sexual Harassment Complaints Committee at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication. She is the author of “Narrating Violence, Constructing Collective Identities: To witness these wrongs unspeakable” (Macmillan UK/US. 2009). Dr Chandra is also the author of "Book of Guardians Trilogy", of which the first two books are “The Fang of Summoning” (Hatchette. 2010), and The Bones of Stars (Hachette. 2013).