Contemporary Gender Formations in India


Book Description

The volume discusses critical issues surrounding the developments in gender movements in the last two decades in India following the Delhi rape case and the ensuing massive protests in December 2012. A critical documentation of some of the key moments surrounding the contemporary gendered formations and radicalisms in South Asia, the chapters span questions of class, caste, sexuality, digital feminisms, and conflict zones. The book looks at anger, protest, and imaginations of resistance. It showcases the ‘new’ visibility that digital spaces have opened up to lend voice to survivors who are let down by traditional justice mechanisms and raises questions regarding ‘individualized’ modes of seeking justice as against traditional ‘collective’ voices that have always been a hallmark of movements. The volume analyses and criticizes the complicity of the state and the court as agents of reinforcing gender violence – an issue that has not been theorized enough by activists and scholars of violence. Further, it also delves into the #MeToo movement and the LoSHA, as both have raised contentious, controversial, and often conflicting debates on the nature of addressing sexual harassment, particularly at the workplace. Calling for further debate and discussions of cyberspace, gender justice, sexual violence, male entitlement, and forms of neoliberal feminism, this volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers in the areas of women and gender studies, sociology and social theory, gender politics, political theory, democracy, protest movements, politics, media and the internet, political advocacy, and law and legal theory. It will also be a compelling read for anyone interested in gender justice and equal rights.




Contemporary Gender Formations in India


Book Description

"The essays in this volume look at how gendered demands for both temporal and spatial access are articulated within specific spaces. The essays look at such questions as, how do categories such as 'time' and 'space' intersect with each other in complementary and contradictory ways? In order to find tangible forms, do such articulations look for alternative 'spaces' themselves? Can digital space, for example, be described as an 'alternative space' within which a certain generation of young feminists has politically come of age in the post-liberalisation era? The volume attempts to provide commentaries and theorisations of the fact that in recent years, as we have witnessed in India, the emergence of a new feminist subjectivity. Such a phenomenon is also accompanied by the growth of a new female subject, within which the fulcrum of this new feminist subjectivity primarily rests. Predominantly urban, predominantly over-educated, Hindu, upper-caste and upper middle class, this new female (and feminist) subjectivity demands rigorous theorisation."--




Contemporary Gender Formations in India


Book Description

The essays in this volume look at how gendered demands for both temporal and spatial access are articulated within specific spaces. The essays look at such questions as, how do categories such as 'time' and 'space' intersect with each other in complementary and contradictory ways? In order to find tangible forms, do such articulations look for alternative 'spaces' themselves? Can digital space, for example, be described as an 'alternative space' within which a certain generation of young feminists has politically come of age in the post-liberalisation era? The volume attempts to provide commentaries and theorisations of the fact that in recent years, as we have witnessed in India, the emergence of a new feminist subjectivity. Such a phenomenon is also accompanied by the growth of a new female subject, within which the fulcrum of this new feminist subjectivity primarily rests. Predominantly urban, predominantly over-educated, Hindu, upper-caste and upper middle class, this new female (and feminist) subjectivity demands rigorous theorisation.




Contemporary Indian Dance


Book Description

Through discussion of a dazzling array of artists in India and the diaspora, this book delineates a new language of dance on the global stage. Myriad movement vocabularies intersect the dancers' creative landscape, while cutting-edge creative choreography parodies gender and cultural stereotypes, and represents social issues.




Women and Social Reform in Modern India


Book Description

An impressive collection of writings on women's issues in Indian history




Contemporary Women’s Writing in India


Book Description

The word doyenne signifies the various expressions of female, feminine, and feminist aspects of contemporary literature in India, through multiple theoretical frameworks. Contemporary Women’s Writing in India is an edited collection dealing with a range of these issues set in the society of Indian culture. Indian women’s literature is still a fertile ground for critical enquiry. There are three sections in the collection: Section I deals with specific instances in history, historical constructions, and representations of gender. Section II offers a varied spectrum of feminist critical discourse on contemporary Indian women’s writing, intersecting with the frameworks of post-colonial theory, deconstruction, perspectives on race and ethnicity, and eco-feminism. Section III touches upon the notion of the woman’s body and psyche through the varied perspectives of psychoanalysis, feminism, and post-feminism. By thoroughly exploring a range of issues, Contemporary Women’s Writing promises to take the reader by the hand, and journey through the unfamiliar but refreshing landscape of women’s literature in India.




Formations of Class & Gender


Book Description

Explanations of how identities are constructed are fundamental to contemporary debates in feminism and in cultural and social theory. Formations of Class & Gender demonstrates why class should be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity and power. Beverley Skeggs identifies the neglect of class, and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society. The book questions how theoretical frameworks are generated for understanding how women live and produce themselves through social and cultural relations. It uses detailed ethnographic research to explain how ′real′ women inhabit and occupy the social and cultural positions of class, femininity and sexuality. As a critical examination of cultural representation - informed by recent feminist theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu - the book is an articulate demonstration of how to translate theory into practice.




Reading the East India Company 1720-1840


Book Description

In Reading the East India Company, Betty Joseph offers an innovative account of how archives—and the practice of archiving—shaped colonial ideologies in Britain and British-controlled India during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on the British East India Company's records as well as novels, memoirs, portraiture and guidebooks, Joseph shows how the company's economic and archival practices intersected to produce colonial "fictions" or "truth-effects" that strictly governed class and gender roles—in effect creating a "grammar of power" that kept the far-flung empire intact. And while women were often excluded from this archive, Joseph finds that we can still hear their voices at certain key historical junctures. Attending to these voices, Joseph illustrates how the writing of history belongs not only to the colonial project set forth by British men, but also to the agendas and mechanisms of agency—of colonized Indian, as well as European women. In the process, she makes a valuable and lasting contribution to gender studies, postcolonial theory, and the history of South Asia.




Gender in Modern India


Book Description

Gender in Modern India brings together pioneering research on a range of themes including social reforms, caste, and contestations; Adivasis, patriarchy, and colonialism; capitalism, political economy, and labour; masculinity and sexuality; health, medical care, and institution building; culture and identity; and migration and its new dynamics. Commissioned in remembrance of the prolific social historian Biswamoy Pati, this volume examines the gender question through a multilayered and multi-dimensional frame in which interdisciplinarity and intersectionality play an important role. Using case studies on gender from diverse geographies?east, west, north, south, and northeast; community locations?Hindu, Muslim, and Christian; and marginalized socio-economic or ethnic habitations such as those of Dalits and Adivasis, the contributors highlight the complexities and diversities of women's negotiations of patriarchies in varied social, ethnic, and community contexts. Collectively, the chapters in this volume focus on three related and overlapping settings?colonial, colonial and postcolonial continuum, and postcolonial. They delineate the multiple lives of gender by focusing on its intersections with other markers of difference including race, class, caste, sexuality, culture, ethnicity, region, and occupation, thereby questioning stereotypes, challenging dated notions and interpretations of gender, and demonstrating the ubiquity of patriarchy.




Burning Down The House


Book Description

This book views domesticity through multiple frames and surveys the rhetoric and practices of domestication in contemporary cultures. It also examines the consequences and costs of homemaking in various geographic and textual locations.