Scarred

L. Ayu Saraswati is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. She is the author of Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie and Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia, which won the 2013 National Women's Studies Association Gloria Anzaldua book prize. She is also the co-editor of Introduction to Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies: Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches and Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader.

"L. Ayu Saraswati artfully weaves memoir and auto-ethnography; theorizing and storytelling; and self-reflection and critical analysis to create a beautiful meditation on her feminist journey through pain. This methodologically innovative and theoretically provocative text is a must-read for scholars of pain, for teachers of feminist methodologies, and for anyone seeking insight into how we can live with pain differently." * Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, author of Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach * "An intimate tour de force that attends to pain as a 'transnational feminist object,' Scarred is a necessary intervention into the human quest to understand pain and its im/possibilities. Indeed, even more so in this neoliberal world that encourage pains' suppression and elimination. From yoga retreats in Costa Rica to the feminist practice of "gibberish" in the mountains of Nepal, to experiences of "feminist enchantment" in Ecuador, Iceland, and Catalonia, this book-part memoir, part ethnographic analysis-is a transdisciplinary and transcontinental fete of feminist cultural studies scholarship. Its theoretical insights, display of feminist autoethnographic fieldwork, and writing craft will have a lasting influence across disciplines." * Devika Chawla, author of Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India's Partition * "How do we create new conversations with and about pain-conversations that are humane, enchanting, and subversive? How do we cultivate new, life-sustaining relationships with pain-rather than reject, repress, or in other ways deny it? (And why would we even want to do so?) How do we address both the private/personal and the social/systemic/political dimensions of pain? Traveling with and through pain, L. Ayu Saraswati explores these and related questions. She risks the personal, offering invaluable lessons and additional perspectives into the complex entanglement of feminist theory/praxis, healing, embodiment, enchantment, and pain." * AnaLouise Keating, author of The Anzalduan Theory Handbook *