Lecture: "Gender and Sexuality Between This World and the Next: Human/Non-Human Relationships in Preta Narrative"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
This talk examines stories in which semi-divine pretas engage in sexual relationships with human partners in order to consider the limits and possibilities generated from examining gender and sexuality from the perspective of the non-human abject Other. As a normative genre, preta literature, like other literature about monsters, demons, or non-human Others, helps construct norms of gender and sexuality in relation to culturally determined unacceptable forms of gendered behaviour. In portraying men and women who fail to fulfill their ritual and social responsibilities and, in a subsequent lifetime, become stripped of the gendered marks of beauty and civility, these stories attempt to relegate gender and sexual transgression to the preta realm. At the same time, men and women continue to transgress norms following their rebirth as a preta. I propose although these narratives attempt to regulate women’s sexual capacity, the preta world itself, as a realm of distinctly unregulated female sexuality, operates in tension with the text’s own normative frameworks.
ADEANA MCNICHOLL is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a scholar of Buddhism in premodern South Asia and in the United States. Her first book, Of Ancestors and Ghosts (OUP 2024), examines the historical development of the Buddhist preta through narrative literature. Her second book project, tentatively titled Black Buddhism: A Religious History of Afro-Asian Solidarity, traces the history of African American engagements with Buddhism up to the Cold War period. The book shows how Black thinkers constructed an alternate modernity that, while intersecting with other forms of Buddhist modernism, offered a politically distinct discourse that cannot be articulated separately from American racial politics.
Zoom Passcode 989442