Instead of offering a neat, coherent ideological perspective, this book uses various conflicting strands of feminist, postcolonial and postmodern thought to comment on the politics of embodiment and its cultural implications. In an attempt to understand how the body is put into discourse and organized in multiple ways, the short prose fragments in this book deal with issues like voyeuristic gaze, masturbation, fetishism, nudity, objectification, ageing, body-mind dualism, forms of otherness, ingredients of intimacies in interpersonal spheres and altered states of consciousness. The issues range from these to the uses of the body as a contested space in matters relating to the ethos of ascetic purity, trends in esoteric cults, management of death and reproduction, practices of mindfulness as a form of self-care and the links between the performance of power and the constitution of self.

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