Description: In the 1940's, the young Punjabi "Mrs. A." reflected on sexuality, gender, and struggle in a dream analysis with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand, drawing on Hindu myth to conceive a better, socialist future. An unconventional history of gender and sexuality in late colonialism, this book reminds us that the West does not have a monopoly on feminism, psychiatry, or ethical paradigms.
Brief description: Sarah Pinto is Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. She is the author of two books on the gendering of medical practice in contemporary India, Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India (Penn, 2014, winner of the Eileen Basker Memorial Prize) and Where There Is No Midwife: Birth and Loss in Rural North India (Berghahn 2008). With Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, and Byron Good, she coedited Postcolonial Disorders (California, 2008).
Review Quotes: An engrossing and poignant work regardless of its moment of arrival, The Doctor and Mrs. A. happens to be a perfect offering now, when our social and ethical worlds--including worlds of research--are crumbling. How, and in what shape, will they be rebuilt?-- "Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences"