Gender and Sexuality in this World and the Next: Human/Non-Human Relationships in Preta Narratives

This paper examines the ways that stories about semi-divine pretas operate within several tensions between Brahmanical gender norms, the patriarchal householder society, the ideals of the celibate sangha, and the everyday gendered realities of men and women. It focuses on tales in which semi-divine pretas engage in sexual relationships with human partners. Following Amy Langenberg’s suggestion that scholars employ a feminist hermeneutic that attends to alternate viewpoints of female sexuality, this paper pushes beyond a conclusion that preta narratives attempt to relegate gender transgression to the realm of the non-human by comparing the preta to female domesticity and beauty. While these narratives attempt to regulate women’s sexual capacity, the preta world itself, as a realm of distinctly unregulated female sexuality, operates in tension with the text’s own normative frameworks. As such, these tales open possibilities for a transformative space that contests the patriarchal heteronormative imperatives of the marriage economy.