The role of women and Tantra is controversial - traditionally the
feminine is a metaphor and actual women are absent, or it involves
the transgressive use of women's bodies to serve male
interests. Biernacki presents a view in which women are revered,
using texts from the 15th to 18th centuries, to reveal a positive
and empowering view of women.
"A rhetorically and poetically beautiful piece of scholarship that incorporates the best of previous work but moves well beyond it into a fundamentally new set of ideas about female agency and speech, the Tantric sex rite, male asceticism, and transcultural encounter. Biernacki's corpus or bodied speech is as blue and as powerful as the Tantric goddesses she writes about." --Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
Loriliai Biernacki is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder
