ABSTRACT OF THEDISSERTATION 


Contentious Bodies: Globalization, Sexuality And The 
Politics of Culture In India 


Dissertation Director 
Dr. Briavel Holcomb 


This dissertation project is an empirical study of globalization in India. The political process of globalization is mapped through three sites -television programs, advertisements, and the 1996MissWorld Pageant. Together these he sites constitute the discursive popular visual archive in India. Employing ethnographic fieldwork and in- depth interviews in addition to analysis of govenunent documents and print media discourses, the focus of this project is not on popular cultural forms per se but rather on political processes where the three sites are endemic to understanding how globalization is manifest and contested in India. In the study each site is representative of contentious debates surrounding representation of women in the visual medium. In each site Itrace shifting political positions adopted by women's organizations, the state, and domestic and multi- national companies in the debate revealing an intersection of power and structural relations. 

The three sites in this project reveal the process of negotiation that shapes the local and the global. Each site is marked by contentious debates that coalesce around the politics of gender and s&ual representation. However, the three sites are not evidence of 

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representational politics alone but rather are instances of the concern with autonomy over the political economy and culture which has witnessed dramatic change since economic reforms in 1991. Therefore, my attempt in this project is to hold in constant tension with each other the political and economic with the representational, rather than collapsing one into the other. I argue that the local cannot, within such consideration, be considered inherently progressive or the global as inherently regressive. Rather, each site shows that globalization does hold possibilities for gender and sexual politics that were previously foreclosed. Therefore this dissertation is concerned with efforts to mobilize nuanced political responses to globalization from within the possibilities and predicaments that globalization generates. 

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