id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
caste-343	Natrajan, Balmurli	Spotted Goddesses: Dalit Women’s Agency-narratives on Caste and Gender Violence: Roja Singh	2021	10	.pdf	application/pdf	5468	227	51	These include responding to rapes, threats, kidnapping, maiming and killing of Dalits, and destruction of the meagre property possessed by Dalits on an almost daily basis; seeking formal residency rights for Dalit communities living in precarity; seeking to eradicate manual scavenging (a bonded labor practice wherein Dalit women from particular castes are condemned to clean the dry toilets of caste communities and physically dispose the feces); fighting for the right of Dalits to bury their dead in a dignified manner; protesting to end the entrenched and debilitating impacts of illicit liquor brewing within Dalit communities, a business that is a nexus of local politicians, religious leaders, and the underground economic overlords with the connivance of the police; seeking wages for ritually unpaid work Spotted Goddesses: Dalit Women’s Agency-narratives on Caste and Gender Violence 387 (such as beating the dappu); and fighting to eradicate long-standing cultural rituals that degrade Dalits especially Dalit women (such as the ritual of forcing newly-wed Dalit women to sleep first with a dominant caste man on their wedding night). The book provokes us to think about how sexuality—in this case the masculinity of dominant caste men which privately wields power over dominant caste women—depends upon the public and routine humiliation and emasculation of Dalit men, and public shaming and hence subservience of Dalit women whose sexuality is sought to be domesticated/controlled due to its purported 384 CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion Vol. 2, No. 2 lack of ‘culture’ or ‘civility’ even while being the object of desire of casted subjects.	cache/caste-343.pdf	txt/caste-343.txt