Caste and Gender:

Generalities of Experience

Abstract

The ways in which the hegemony of the hierarchies of the caste structure are produced and continued are different from the ways in which the hegemony of man over woman is replicated in reproductive heteronormativity. The exclusion of the dalit and the exclusion of the non-normative sexualities work through different structural grids. Yet they intersect at certain spaces. The body of the woman is one very important place where this intersection occurs. Of course, these are logical and phenomenological processes at work at an abstract level. And definitely, these are not the only processes at work. The present paper focuses on, yet one more time, the woman's body as the site where processes of caste and gender intersect. To do this, it reads a story in Bangla. In the process, the standpoints of caste and gender are seen to be constituted by their dissipated enunciations in the social.