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Niromi de Soyza's Tamil Tigress: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka's Bloody Civil War (2011) is a memoir about a year in the author's and her friend Ajanthi's lives when they joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) and fought as female militants in the second phase of the Sri Lankan civil war. Soyza's autobiographical account depicts the 1980s when the Tamil Tigers were fighting the Sri Lankan government and the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF) in the northern and eastern parts of the country. As teenagers, Niromi and Ajanthi were highly inspired by the revolutionary idealism of the Liberation Tigers and, with great zeal, decided to dedicate their lives to the cause of their community's rights in Sri Lanka. The article reads Soyza's memoir as a powerful depiction of how the Sri Lankan civil war and its gruesome violence affected women and their subjectivities. The article focuses on the psychosocial turbulence of young women like Niromi and Ajanthi, who took up arms with an unflinching hope to combat the Sinhalese atrocities and the Sri Lankan government's systemic apathy towards the Tamils. Unlike men, these female warriors were not valorized; instead, they faced family derision and social derogation at many levels. This article examines how those women who had dreamt of asserting their potency and agency vis-à-vis militancy have finally been left beleaguered and disillusioned. Uncovering the insidious differential treatment in a supposedly gender-equal organization such as the LTTE, de Soyza's memoir provides an intimate glimpse of the gendered discrimination that stereotypes women only as subordinate to their male counterparts, even when they act as equals. The article thus demonstrates that Niromi de Soyza's recollection offers an insightful understanding of the ambiguous predicament of female militants and, through her final disclosure, enunciates that war and militancy can hardly provide avenues for women's empowerment and affirmation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protracted armed conflict in Sri Lanka (1983–2009) has had a significant impact on the social fabric of the country. The Tamil community – the women especially – bore the brunt of the traumatic spill-over of decades of warfare that brutalised all areas of life, especially in the North. With the belief that narrative literature on war captures the complex ways in which gender, war, and peace interact and impact configurations of the female gender in turbulent war-torn and post-war societies, this paper critically reads Rohini Mohan's The Seasons of Trouble (2014), a non-fiction narrative of the life stories of three individuals that lay claim to 'truth' and therefore is placed in a strong position in relation to collective memory, archive, and history. The critical content analysis from a feminist theoretical standpoint conveys how the trajectories of Tamil women caught in Sri Lanka's war shine a light on the ways in which dominant configurations of war and peace construct the female gender identity in specific ways and thereby shape the way women are framed in war-torn and post-war societies with tangible implications on the lived realities of Tamil women in Sri Lanka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Tobacco consumption is a public health problem in Tamil Nadu. Objectives: The current study was done to estimate the prevalence of tobacco consumption among rural women and to identify the sociodemographic characteristics with high prevalence of tobacco consumption. Materials and Methods: It was a community-based cross-sectional descriptive study conducted among women ≥18 years of age. Mixed methods were employed to obtain the comprehensive picture about the substance use among women. Multistage random sampling method was used to interview 210 women using a semi-structured and pretested schedule. This was followed by key informant interviews, in which nine women were interviewed. Frequency distributions and Chi-square test were employed to study the association. In addition, manual content analysis was done to identify the reasons for the initiation of tobacco consumption and the measures to curb the practice. Results: The prevalence of tobacco consumption among the women was estimated as 15.2%. Women in the lower socioeconomic status group showed a higher prevalence of tobacco consumption than the middle and high socioeconomic status group. All 32 (100%) women were consuming tobacco products in the smokeless forms. Further, 28 (87.5%) women were not willing to quit tobacco consumption. Conclusion: The prevalence of tobacco consumption among the women was estimated to be above expectation of the national figures. Lower socioeconomic class and poor educational status were found to be major determinants for tobacco consumption among rural women.

In post-war contexts, attention is given to women's participation and barriers to their participation in formal processes (for example, peace talks, economic initiatives, and elections). Yet, women have engaged in various activities to exercise collective and individual agency to impact political participation. This article examines how Tamil women's political participation in post-war Sri Lanka exists along a continuum, from formal participation within state structures and party politics to informal community participation. Scholarship about Tamil women's political participation is framed within discourses of "militants," "ex-combatants," "political mothers," or "victims." Using narrative interviews, we argue that – based on their awareness of unequal gendered power relations, structures, and norms impacting their lives in post-war Sri Lanka – Tamil women in Mannar exercise agency to challenge these constraints and promote a broader transformative political arena. Some women attempt to expand the agency of others and to promote a collective voice through which women can be better represented in politics. Drawing on feminist international relations and gender and development knowledge, this study demonstrates how political agency is constituted within informal arenas, disrupting masculinist assumptions about who is considered a political actor and what counts as political agency by examining the spectrum of political participation in post-war contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Tobacco consumption is a public health problem in Tamil Nadu. Objectives: The current study was done to estimate the prevalence of tobacco consumption among rural women and to identify the sociodemographic characteristics with high prevalence of tobacco consumption. Materials and Methods: It was a community-based cross-sectional descriptive study conducted among women ≥18 years of age. Mixed methods were employed to obtain the comprehensive picture about the substance use among women. Multistage random sampling method was used to interview 210 women using a semi-structured and pretested schedule. This was followed by key informant interviews, in which nine women were interviewed. Frequency distributions and Chi-square test were employed to study the association. In addition, manual content analysis was done to identify the reasons for the initiation of tobacco consumption and the measures to curb the practice. Results: The prevalence of tobacco consumption among the women was estimated as 15.2%. Women in the lower socioeconomic status group showed a higher prevalence of tobacco consumption than the middle and high socioeconomic status group. All 32 (100%) women were consuming tobacco products in the smokeless forms. Further, 28 (87.5%) women were not willing to quit tobacco consumption. Conclusion: The prevalence of tobacco consumption among the women was estimated to be above expectation of the national figures. Lower socioeconomic class and poor educational status were found to be major determinants for tobacco consumption among rural women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to explore embodied histories of violence through an insightful discussion on the representations of scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women in Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic women's writing in English. The study employs a qualitative approach and conducts a content analysis of selected narratives in the primary texts: Shankari Chandran's Song of the Sun God (2017), V.V. Ganeshananthan's Love Marriage (2008), and Mary Anne Mohanraj's Bodies in Motion (2005). The narratives selected for the study are approached as a body of literary work that portrays scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women both within and outside Sri Lanka against the backdrop of ethnic and communal violence. It posits that in a context of war, bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women, as represented in the novels, are perceived as battle sites on which warring factions inscribe their authority. The study then examines the legacy of violence as a shared communal trait among Sri Lankan Tamils and argues for the alternative presented through the narratives of approaching the scarred bodies of Sri Lankan Tamil women as spaces of empowerment, as opposed to impure or sullied bodies that are incapable of representing their Sri Lankan Tamil families and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how Tamil women in Australia reconstruct memories of Sri Lanka's war through postmemory and personal experiences. Tamil women's understandings of war are important for unravelling multiple sites of marginalization across social and political landscapes that challenge dominant perspectives of being Tamil-Australian. The article draws on sixteen in-depth interviews with Tamil women resettled in Australia as children in the 1980s and 1990s, foregrounding their unique position as part of a war generation. It shows that Tamil women's experiences of political engagement during the final stages of war were motivated by memories of individual and collective sufferings. However, loss, exclusion and forced migration characterize their ambivalent connections to homeland. Not always tied to dominant memories of war, victimhood and subordination, the article concludes that each Tamil woman represents ongoing resistances, survival and renegotiations of Tamil diasporic experiences of war that are produced by their memory and memory work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of women in maintenance of language and identity with reference to Tamils in Mauritius. Topics include women's involvement in Mauritius, the challenges faced by women and women's role in propagation of culture. It also discusses the constraints in maintaining identity and the contribution of Tamil women in the past to maintenance of cultural identity.

Traditional understandings of war overlook its productive capacity. To remedy this neglect this article focuses on the case of Sri Lanka war and critically engages with the war's generative and transformative power. The article develops a historical, societal and global analysis of the Sri Lanka war in order to trace back the creation of ethnic tension, to show how war is embedded in the societies and to demonstrate the war's global effects. It argues that the war in Sri Lanka produced both Sinhalese and Tamil identity and the latter's gendered character and spatial distribution. This article aims to make a contribution to the literature by primarily challenging the conventional understanding of war and showing how identities can be the outcome of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of recruitment in explaining variation in participation for female combatants in rebel movements. I argue that recruitment has little impact on the nature of women's participation within a rebel movement. Drawing on the case of the LTTE in Sri Lanka, I find that the political identities of individual female fighters, shaped by prior experiences of state repression, in particular militarization, can better explain variation in participation than the specific manner of their recruitment. I demonstrate that even in cases of coercive recruitment, female participation cannot be predicted and may even evidence high levels of commitment to the insurgent cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article takes one young Tamil woman, Vasantha, and her account of growing up in the northern war zone of Jaffna in Sri Lanka. Vasantha's narrative and her adolescence, like others of her generation, was framed by living at the margins of the Sri Lankan state (though under its bombardment) and under the control of a repressive quasi-state actor, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam ( LTTE). In this article, I twin Vasantha's fashioning of her life-story with a meditation on the ways in which the Sri Lankan war, specifically LTTE control over Tamil lives, has come to ambivalently frame and produce particular understandings of selfhood, articulations of collectivity and individuality. Here, I argue that individuation takes many different forms, and, specifically, that the ruptures of war produces individuation in unexpected ways. I take Vasantha's story to explicate the experiences of young people in northern Sri Lanka, and, as an illustration of the contraction and expansion of particular possibilities of selfhood in the midst of political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed within the segmented assimilation perspective, this paper examines community construction by middle-class, professional Tamil immigrant women in Atlanta, Georgia. It argues that community building is a fundamentally gendered settlement activity predominantly performed by Tamil women. Using gendered labor, they construct a dynamic community across the settlement process, encompassing formal and informal, ethnic and non-ethnic components and sites, to take the form of wives' support and women's networks, cross-cultural friendships, ethnic spaces and fictive kinship. With the emergent bonding and bridging social capital, they chart their segmented incorporation as model minorities who are ethnic. In the process however, gender, race/ethnic and class hierarchies are often reinforced. In this article, I discuss community construction by middle-class, professional Tamil immigrant women in Atlanta, Georgia. Framed by the segmented assimilation perspective on immigrant incorporation, this article asks three questions: (1) what are the forms of community constructed by Tamil women, (2) how is community building gendered, and (3) how does the constructed community facilitate their incorporation into America? By focusing on middle-class Tamil immigrants, this article advances the scholarship in several ways: (1) by theorizing community formation among South Asians it nuances our understanding of the ethnic landscape of Asians in the United States that has predominantly focused on East Asians; (2) by conferring visibility on a little-studied Indian regional group, it challenges the dominant imaginary of a homogenized Indian diaspora in the United States as being predominantly North Indian (Gujarati/Punjabi); and in so doing (3) is attentive to the interactions and reconstitutions of stratifications of class, caste, and gender in shaping the Tamil experience in the United States. 3 1 argue that community building among professional Tamils is predominantly performed by Tamil women. They construct a dynamic community that takes the form of wives' support and women's networks, cross-cultural friendships, ethnic spaces, and fictive kinship. Although the emergent bonding and bridging social capital facilitates their segmented incorporation as model minorities who are ethnic, the process also reinscribes gender, race/ethnic, class and caste hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helping women victimized by intimate partner violence (IPV) is a challenge, particularly when the women belong to diverse ethnic groups. The objective of our study was to collect information on perceptions of coping with IPV from the perspective of a specific immigrant group of women. Sixty-three women from the Tamil community in Toronto representing different generations and experiences of IPV were interviewed in focus group settings about their views of coping with IPV. Study findings suggested that their views were deeply embedded in their sociocultural context and influenced by the gender-role expectations from the community. The women showed a marked preference for 'passive' modes of coping rather than 'active.' Study findings have implications for the development of alternative approaches to helping ethnically diverse women deal with IPV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the experiences of Tamil professional immigrant mothers in the U.S. and working-class wives in Peru. It highlights the difference of mothering ideologies by both Tamil and Peruvian women. It explores the challenges encounter by these immigrant women in transnational environment including cultural preservation, family relations, and work-life balance.

This article explores the continued relevance of menstrual pollution among the Vattima, a Tamil Brahmin sub-caste. Even as they are part of the Tamil Brahmin diaspora, the Vattima Brahmins, a small, close-knit community, are in active contact with ancestral villages in the Kaveri delta region. Based on data gathered from Vattima in India and in USA, this article looks at the discourse surrounding menstruation and seclusion practices across generations. It highlights the ways in which changes in Vattima marriage practices, women’s access to education as well as migration to, and employment in, urban areas, have contributed to significant changes in attitudes to menstrual pollution. Observing menstrual pollution, however, is seen as crucial in sustaining notions of Brahmin-hood within their homes and among other Brahmins. This is made possible by constantly rede-fining the space and time that should be kept pollution-free. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Elder abuse and neglect occur in every community and society. While considerable research is emerging on elder abuse, limited health science research exists to-date on older women experiencing abuse and neglect in the post-migration context in Canada. Building on our community partners' interest in further understanding the topic of elder abuse and our previous work on violence against women throughout the migration process, this qualitative study explored older immigrant women's experiences of and responses to abuse and neglect in one community. Data generation involved individual interviews and three focus groups with a group of older women (N=43) from the Sri Lankan Tamil community in Toronto. Findings show that older women experienced various forms of neglect and abuse and that the primary abusers were their husbands, children and children-inlaw. Their community and Canadian society at large were also implicated. Women's responses to abuse were shaped by many factors at micro, meso, and macro-societal levels. In responding to abuse, older immigrant women showed remarkable resilience. Strategies are offered to better support older women's attempts to cope with abuse and to promote their resiliencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author discusses the social, cultural and political roles of Tamil women in Sri Lanka. She explores the sufferings of Tamil women during the civil war, police brutality, repression of their rights, and ethnic discrimination. She also argues that injustices force Tamil women to join the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelem (LTTE) which documents human rights violations, and contends that these women emerge as bearers of culture as a result of the prolonged exposure to conflict.

'Salt, Sand and Water' is the outcome of a writing project that evolved out of a series of workshops in theatre and writing carried out in Sri Lanka over a period of three weeks in 2004. The workshops brought together 14 Muslim and Tamil women into a dialogue about the condition of displacement that has become an integral part of the decades-long ethnic conflict and ensuing civil war in Sri Lanka. Having lived as neighbours, these women were thrown headlong into an inter and intra-ethnic conflict as a result of which they continue to live as neighbours but now as strangers in their displaced state. The coming together of these women is an exercise in forming a political consciousness of ethnic and gender marginality and displacement. This becoming collective consciousness celebrates heterogeneity, not for its own sake, but for the query it brings into understandings of the state, power, authority, privilege and territory. As a political and theoretical intervention of the formation of the state, this collaborative essay dislocates the notion of place as fixed by recovering its mobility in the midst of the political, cultural and economic realms. Similarly, the emerging consciousness of the displaced class undermines traditional notions of ethnicity as homogenous and of the state as bounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on intimate partner violence (IPV) across populations is challenging because of the multiplicity of definitions and lack of clarity about the behaviors that constitute IPV. The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which Sri Lankan Tamil women in Toronto understand, define, and experience IPV. Focus group interviews were conducted with women representing different ages and stages of life. Findings suggest that definitions of IPV were not culturally specific. Rather, the Tamil women defined IPV broadly and recognized different forms of coercive control. However, psychologically abusive behaviors were identified that held particular meanings for this community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, females have been an integral part of fighting forces in both international conflicts and in armed struggle in at least 38 internal conflicts. While some scholars argue that recent wars have thrust women into new roles, enabling them to transform their social situations, identities and destinies, others question whether females achieve 'emancipation' through active participation in warfare. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka that has been engaged in conflict with the Sri Lankan government since 1983, and actively recruits female cadres, provides an interesting context to explore issues of female empowerment in the context of armed struggle. Drawing from interviews with four Sri Lankans living in Canada, this paper traces the perceived extent of female emancipation within the LTTE. While the participation of females in unconventional military roles represents a drastic change in behaviour expected of Tamil women, the militant movement appears to reinforce existing patterns of gender constructions, ultimately impeding the attainment of meaningful empowerment for females. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To investigate, using the Health Belief Model as a theoretical framework, the incentives and barriers to breast cancer screening in a recent immigrant group, older Tamil women from Sri Lanka. Method Tamil women who had had a mammogram and Tamil women who had never had a mammogram were compared on the following variables: socio-demographics, personal risk estimates for breast cancer, risk-reduction expectancies, beliefs and knowledge about breast cancer and screening recommendations, and acculturation. Results Groups differed significantly in terms of education, years living in North America, acculturation, and beliefs/knowledge about breast cancer. When education and acculturation were controlled, perceived barriers to mammography were most predictive of mammography utilization. Discussion Results are discussed with a view to developing culture-appropriate educational campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on constructions of gender and ethnicity in four Tamil novels. Voices and reform for women in precolonial Tamil literature; Ethnic, moral and mental landscape of Tamil reforms; Women's sexual and educational constraints; Male authors and female sexuality.

This article questions prevailing anthropological explanations of the propensity of young Tamil wives to be possessed by demons. Symbolic analysis of the relationships between these demons and their victims in the context of exorcism suggests that the deeper issues addressed in episodes of spirit possession concern cultural interpretations of female alienation. Far from providing an opportunity to protest their powerlessness, participation in these trance-inducing rites forces women to confess to illicit romantic fantasies. Their 'therapy', such as it is, consists of exorcizing those sentiments and re-establishing a sense of self congruent with their marital responsibilities and cultural expectations of the 'good wife'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comments on the essay on the status of deprivation in Tamil women. Focus on possession as the opening phase in the development of cults of affliction; Disclaim on the determinist ambition; Argument that the male response of exorcizing the spirits that trouble their wives represents a further attempt by men to control women.

An abstract of the article "An Analysis of Gender Practice of Tamil Christian Women with particular reference to women of Kodambakkam Church of South India Risen Redeemer's Church in Chenna," by Beulah Herbert is presented.