Scarred - by L Ayu Saraswati

About the Book

"A transnational feminist autoethnography of traveling to twenty countries in one year to find healing and have a different relationship with pain"--

Book Synopsis

PROSE Award Winner for Biography and Autobiography

Named one of Library Journal's Best Books of 2023

Winner, Next Generation Indie Book Awards - Women's Nonfiction

Offers thought-provoking theories and life-transforming ways to deal with pain

What can we ask of pain? How can we be more creative and courageous in carrying pain in our lives? In this genre-bending work that is equal parts memoir and scholarly criticism, L. Ayu Saraswati provides thought-provoking theories and life-transforming ways to understand pain, specifically in relation to feminism. Arguing that pain is not merely a state we are in, Scarred reframes pain as a "transnational feminist object," something that we can carry across international borders. Drawing on her own experience traveling across twenty countries within just over a year, Saraswati aims to bring readers along on her journey so that they might ask themselves, "How can I live with pain differently?"

By using pain as a lens of feminist analysis, Scarred allows us to chart how power produces and operates through pain, and how pain is embodied and embedded in relationships. Saraswati provides a heartfelt and engaging recount of her experiences while also pushing the boundaries of the respective fields her story engages with. She allows for renewed academic and personal insights to blossom by using a blend of transnational feminist theory, travel studies, and pain studies. Ultimately, Scarred invites us to reframe pain and ask how might we carry it in a more humane, life-sustaining, enchanting, and feminist way.

Review Quotes

""An in-depth and innovative book that will be useful to social work practitioners, feminist readers, researchers, scholars and individuals interested in pain and power dynamics, body politics and gender issues. Additionally, it will benefit those seeking to understand the intersection of pain with social structures and those seeking personal growth and societal transformation.""--Tingting Hu and Yueying Wang "Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work"

"Saraswati applies a feminist analytic lens in her approach to pain in this transformative work. She believes that everyone carries pain, and offers provocative theories about how to manage it. Part memoir, this book examines Saraswati's own pain in addition to her scholarly critique, which enhances and supports her findings and conclusions."-- "Library Journal, Best Books of 2023"

"Theoretically astute yet intensely readable, this book suggests that all of us carry pain--and that everyone also inherently possesses the ability to work with pain instead of fighting against it. The book emphasizes that pain is integral to people; it's not an incidental feature of circumstances. An exceptional discussion of strategies for processing pain with and through the body."-- "Library Journal (starred review)"

"With her latest book, L. Ayu Saraswati offers readers an original, inclusive and intimate examination of pain through a feminist lens. As rigorous as it is readable, Scarred seeks to reframe our relationships to pain, healing, embodiment and enchantment."--Karla Strand "Ms. Magazine"

"Drawing on her travels across 20 countries in just over a year, Saraswati, a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, shines a feminist light on pain. Her book fuses several modes of storytelling, including memoir, academic theory, ethnography, and criticism, and aims to reframe the reader's understanding of pain and the female body."-- "Publishers Weekly"

"An intimate tour de force. 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 encourages pain's 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."-- "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 Anzaldúan Theory Handbook"

"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 anyone seeking insight into how we can live with pain differently."-- "Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, author of Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach"

About the Author

L. Ayu Saraswati is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexually Studies at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa. 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 Anzaldúa 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.