Join us for the next installment in our "No More Than A Page" series. This series gives an opportunity for faculty and advanced graduate students to receive feedback on their research in process. Presenters provide attendees with a one-page summary of their current research and attendees engage in a lively discussion.
This installment will feature Kate Kaura, a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Studies. Kate's page of research is below.
The paper will ask how can Hindu goddess myths become tools of feminist resistance while remaining entangled in the very systems of caste, patriarchy and sexual exploitation they seek to challenge? Through a transnational feminist analysis of the digital graphic novel Priya and the Lost Girls (2019) and the worship of Goddess Yellamma among sex workers in India, this project explores the contradictions of shakti—feminine divine power—as both a source of empowerment and a force implicated in structural violence. But beyond simple binaries, this project asks whether reimagining myth can transform gendered violence or whether even the most radical feminist stories remain constrained by the religious, cultural and social hierarchies in which they emerge.
This event is free, open to the public and welcoming to everyone. Co-hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion, the Department of Comparative Studies and the Humanities Institute.
The Goddess as Superhero: Divine Power, Dangerous Myths, and the Contradictions of Feminist Liberation
In the wake of global digital activism against gender-based violence, particularly following the 2012 Delhi gang rape, feminist initiatives such as the graphic novel Priya’s Shakti have emerged to challenge sexual violence through digital storytelling and Hindu goddess imagery. The comic portrays a young female survivor of sexual assault in rural India as a reimagined Hindu goddess, taking the reader on a visual adventure that transforms women of our worldly realm into the divine feminine of the mystical to restore gender justice. In India, reappropriating goddesses such as Kali and Durga have been used by some feminist groups as symbols of shakti, a term from Brahmanical Hinduism meaning “feminine spiritual power.” Shakti exists dialectically and in contradiction, acting creatively and destructively, nurturing but also ruthless, chaotic and orderly. My dissertation uses transnational feminist theory to analyze how the symbol of shakti and the goddess is deployed across social movements, most specifically in the popular graphic novel series Priya’s Shakti, exposing her ambiguity, multiple meanings, and contradictory motivations.
The Priya’s Shakti series exists within a larger digital environment marked by the rapid circulation of opposing views and political extremism across geographic and ideological boundaries, in which feminist activists, religious communities, and Hindu nationalist movements use Hindu goddess imagery. This juxtaposition raises the central theme of my research: how different digital communities use goddess imagery to construct competing understandings of identity, gender, and power? For the purposes of this NMTAP, I will focus on my third chapter, which analyses the third comic in the Priya’s Shakti series that addresses sex trafficking, titled Priya and the Lost Girls (2019). My chapter both reimagines the religious studies category of myth as a transnational feminist tool to address sex trafficking, while simultaneously exposing the limits of myth through the complex and contradictory chosen goddess figure of many sex workers, the goddess Yellamma. Although the figure of Yellamma and the women of the Priya and the Lost Girls comic have differing genealogies, social contexts, and intentionalities, this chapter’s comparative project demonstrates that by contrasting the main heroine of the comic, Priya (and the sex trafficked survivors in the comic she rescues), with Yellamma and her followers, it offers a productive tension to complicate neat binaries of empowerment or coercion. This chapter is grounded in the lived religious realities of sex workers to inform our analysis of the sex trafficked victims of Priya and the Lost Girls. Through close readings of the comic’s narrative and visual world-building, I show how myth is strategically created/reimagined while remaining entangled in social, cultural, and religious structures that cannot fully transform society, or men’s violence against women, through myths and storytelling alone.
Yellamma’s mythology has been used in some regional traditions to religiously legitimize the devadasi practice, in which girls are dedicated to the goddess through a ritual marriage that can render them vulnerable to sexual exploitation. The devadasi practice of offering Dalit (marginalized-caste) girls to brahmin (dominant-caste) temples as dancers, entertainers, and sexual slaves reveals how some goddess traditions can both elevate and divinize women’s sexual labor and social positionality, while also remaining entangled in caste hierarchies, religiously motivated (forced) sexual slavery, economic inequality, and structural exploitation. Yellamma thus embodies the contradictions of shakti: these practices show how religious narratives can sanctify the exploitation of marginalized women while simultaneously providing them with spiritual identity, agency, and power.
Despite the comic’s attempts at a transnational feminist storytelling project—one that isdigital, embodied, and globally identified with the struggle of sex trafficked women—reimagining myth to (re)shape society may not be able to fully escape some of these deeply hegemonic structures of religion, caste, and patriarchy.
Ultimately, the tension between Yellamma and Priya and the Lost Girls reveals myth’s messy entanglement with religious control, devotion, violence, and social justice; these case studies reveal how goddess myths have the power to legitimate, heal, harm, and liberate.
The Humanities Institute and its related centers host a wide range of events, from intense discussions of works in progress to cutting-edge presentations from world-known scholars, artists, activists and everything in between.
We value in-person engagement at our events as we strive to amplify the energy in the room. To submit an accommodation request, please send your request to Cody Childs, childs.97@osu.edu
