Love's rites : same sex marriage in India and the west /​ Ruth Vanita.

1. Introduction
2. Who decides? : marriage law, the state, and mutual consent
3. Is the spirit gendered? : fluid gender, sex change, and same-sex marriage
4. "Immortal longings" : love-death, rebirth, and union through life after life
5. A second self : traditions of romantic friendship
6. Monstrous to miraculous - same-sex reproduction and parenting
7. All in the family : same-sex relationships in traditional families
8. "Married among their companions" : female-female relations in premodern erotica
9. Aspiring to union : twentieth-century cinema
10. Conclusion.

"Love's Rite is the first book to examine same-sex weddings and same-sex couple suicides in India over the last two decades, discussing these phenomena in the context of the international debate on gay marriage, and in the context of past and present Indian and Euro-American cultural representations of same-sex union. Ruth Vanita explores a wide variety of same-sex unions, from fourteenth-century narratives about co-wives who miraculously produce a child together to nineteenth-century depictions of ritualized unions between women, and marriages today between gay men and lesbians, arranged over the internet."--BOOK JACKET.