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Synopsis How does one examine the lives women script in the intimacy of diaries, letters and other personal narratives and how can one relate these to the social worlds in which They are produced?

Centring its investigation on contemporary Kerala, this study examines a range of divers and seemingly disconnected discourses around the Kerala model, tourism, AIDS and sexual violence and argues that present-day Kerala maps two Opposing worlds. It Imagines itself as a perfected utopia and, simultaneously, also as a dystopia- a society that is an the edge of collapse. The book attempts to explore these divergent self-descriptions of Kerala.

Concurrently it also analyses a range og personal narratives to trace how 'dominant women' configures their selves. It deploys the term 'dominant women' to signal women of relative privilege, whose experience speaks simultaneously of devaluation and dominance. Their lives also signal the asymmetries, the instabilities and the inequalities within the category 'woman' These women are in many ways, the subject of the development narratives of the state. The book reveals How discourses apparently removed from women's everyday, shape their personal experiences and, in turn, how women's self-formations overwrites, extend and rework these 'Larger' discourses.

Sreekumar's writing is compelling and textured. Her research, Based on a wide range of women's narratives, makes this a riveting journey into the making of riveting journey into the making of modern-day Kerala.