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: Sarah Pinto's The Doctor and Mrs. A is at once a strikingly patient and a boldly motile monograph... Anyone with interests in anthropology, history, the medical humanities, gender and sexuality studies, ethics, and South Asian studies will benefit from accompanying Pinto through this creative journey of thought.---Talia Katz, Ethos