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Adolescent girls are inundated with contradictory messages on sexuality. Adolescence is socially constructed as being controlled by 'raging hormones' but 'good girls' are asexual, devoid of any desire or passion. Schools discipline students' bodies to prohibit any spilling over of sexuality that may pollute the educational environment. At the same time girls are also exposed through the internet to 'girl power' culture speaking of freedom, autonomy and choice in matters of sexuality. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 adolescent girls aged 15 to 19 years belonging to the middle class, going to reputed English medium private schools in Kolkata, a city in India, this article explores how adolescent girls speak of denial of their sexual subjectivity and disciplining of their bodies through surveillance in schools. Keywords: Adolescent girls, Body, Sexuality, Kolkata, hormones, Indian adolescents, reputation, women's sexuality, Introduction One constant message that adolescent girls receive in many places worldwide, is that a woman's reputation is linked to her sexual character. A 'good girl' is seen to be [...]

In the consumer culture of late modernity, young women are obsessed with their physical appearance and attempt to conform to socially constructed beauty standards. Adolescent girls are surrounded by images of beauty through advertising, television, films, magazines and the recent beauty blogs that have burst forth on the worldwide web. This paper is on the use of beauty blogs by adolescent girls of the age group 15 to 19 years living in Kolkata, whereby depicting that there is no escape from feminine embodiment even in the digital world. The researcher has compiled the beauty/fashion blogs that adolescent girls regularly visit and hence has attempted to understand the girls' use of the blogs and what the blogs contain. This paper looks at the beauty culture associated with these blogs and traces the popularity of these online beauty resources to the renewed focus on the female body and visual appearance in consumer culture that is transnational. The beauty blogs are virtual feminized spaces created only for women and contain categories of homemade corrective treatments, personal grooming and images of array of beauty products that teach women how to 'do femininity'. The blogs promote the idea that beauty is an essential component of femininity and encourage women to take beauty as a serious thing to be achieved to satisfy themselves and not to be done for the male gaze. Termed as 'postfeminist sensibility' the blogs depict women as heterosexual desiring subjects with independence and choice. Young women in turn constructed feminine beautification as an empowering as well as a pleasurable experience for them. Keywords: technology, beauty, blogs, consumer culture, Sexual subjectification, self-disciplining, embodiment, pleasure, Introduction Technology is identified as masculine, is claimed to be embedded in masculine culture, and masculinity is defined in terms of technical skill and competence. However, with each new innovation [...]

This article examines women's negotiation of potential risks in public spaces in the urban city of Kolkata. The deliberate focus on the public is to demonstrate that the city has different meanings for women than men in terms of risk so that fear of rape in the city becomes a virtual threat in the lives of women. The fear may not be linked to the actual violence but to the potential for harm that is experienced by individual women. Feminist scholars have pointed out that narratives of crime and violence have always constructed the city as the space of danger for women while intimate danger within the home have significantly been trivialized and privatized. The focus of this article is to understand women's behavioral response to the threat of crime in public spaces. This article attempts to understand the strategies used by women to avoid risk within the urban city of Kolkata. The strategies used to avoid risks of harm are informed by women's class location and educational attainment. This study demonstrates that though women compromise on their freedom of mobility, self-expression and social experience to remain safe, women also take risks to access public spaces. By taking risks like being out alone late after dark, by engaging in 'masculinized' activities such as engaging in public drinking and dressing according to one's choice that violates social codes, women resist fear, contest dominant conceptions of 'appropriate' feminine behavior and construct alternative meanings. Key Words: Risk, Public, Fear of Crime, Avoidance, Taking Risk, Introduction In India, in urban contexts the effects of globalization has rendered women visible as workers in public spaces but it has not done away with the patriarchal notion that [...]

Abstract This article uses qualitative methodology to explore women's fear of crime in intimate relations, an area until now uncharted. The rich scholarship on fear of crime has exclusively dealt [...]