Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Faculty Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 2009 Im/possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, and Affinal Solidarity in Modern South Asia Coralynn V. Davis Bucknell University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/fac_journ Part of the Asian Studies Commons, Human Geography Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Davis, Coralynn V.. "Im/possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, and Affinal Solidarity in Modern South Asia." Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (2009) : 243-272. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Im/possible Lives: Gender, class, self-fashioning, and affinal solidarity in modern South Asia Coralynn V. Davis* Women’s and Gender Studies Program Bucknell University Lewisburg, Pennsylvania USA Abstract Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila, South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the “modern” selves envisioned within them are constrained by both overt and subtle means.