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This article compares the 1950s and 1960s short story writing of two influential yet underexamined women writers, Mannu Bhandari (1931–) and R. Chudamani (1931–2010), who are considered key representatives of the Hindi and Tamil literary canons, respectively. Mani demonstrates that from within their specific geographic and historical contexts, Bhandari's and Chudamani's writing provides insight into literary discourses of gender equality circulating in the immediate postindependence moment. In particular, she argues that these women writers broadened the scope of feminist thought and literary expression existing at the time through their rhetorical use of a language of entitlement that universalizes feminine desire in humanist terms. They did so through the portrayal of female characters who express the desire to possess sexual freedom, economic independence, and human equality on the same terms as the male characters. Feminist scholarship has characterized the 1950s and 1960s as a moment of paucity in women's writing and decline in feminist politics. Yet Bhandari's and Chudamani's distinct uses of a language of entitlement offer a deeper understanding of the role of the literary in shaping feminist thought. Their work thus provides alternative genealogies of the categories of feminism and women's writing in India.

Desire is bound up with structural inequalities and normative violence. Even when it seeks to resist them, it keeps risking to reproduce hierarchies. While taking seriously the power analysis of desire, Engel, Govrin, and Holzhey have organized the lecture series 'Desire's Multiplicity and Serendipity' in order to explore the potentials and limits of desire as a transformative force. They propose to draw on theories asserting desire's multiplicity and to face desire's paradoxes by calling on serendipity, allowing for fortunate errans. Starting the conversation with their different understandings of serendipity and the politics of desire in psychic, social, and structural registers, they wish to engage in a discussion with the public: What are the potentials of happenstance and erring when trying to leave the dis/comfort zone of identity and normative forms of intimacy and sexuality? How can one find openings for queer reconceptualizations of desire? Antke Engel is an independent scholar working in the fields of queer, feminist and poststructuralist theory, political philosophy, and cultural politics. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Potsdam University in 2001, and since 2006 she is director of the Institute for Queer Theory (Berlin) Jule Jakob Govrin is a Ph.D candidate in philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and a research assistant of the Institute for Queer Theory, Berlin. In her Ph.D. project she is focusing on the epistemological entanglements of desire and economy. Her research interests include political and social philosophy, theories of desire, sexuality studies, poststructuralist philosophies. Christoph Holzhey is the founding director of the ICI Berlin. He received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (1993) and another one in German literature with a dissertation on the critical potential of paradoxical pleasures in aesthetics (2001). ; desire Conserves desire Transgresses desire: On the Paradoxical Politics of Desire , roundtable, ICI Berlin, 4 February 2015 ...

"There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory," writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love. In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives.

The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional "informed desire" tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

Configuring Desire was a presentation by Mo Throp to the BreadMatters III Forum, in West Cork, Ireland, as part of the Bread Matters series. BreadMatters is a platform for exchange and collaboration, a medium for bringing together professionals from various disciplines, communities and cultural backgrounds to question and debate across a range of disciplines, focusing on contemporary issues such as migration and emigration; the construction of identity; power, globalization and equality; historical legacy; ritual and symbolism in contemporary life; connectedness and communion. BreadMatters thus explores the social, cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and theological issues around bread.

This is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desire presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring how the heterosexual body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. The geographies presented here range across Europe, America, Australasia, Africa, the Pacific and the imaginary, cutting across city and country and analysing the positions of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and heterosexuals. T