ABSTRACT

This book frames the major debates and contemporary issues in women’s and gender studies in India. It locates them in the context of key theories, their interlinkages, and significant crossings and overlaps within the field while juxtaposing feminist and queer perspectives.

The essays in the volume foreground emerging challenges as well as offer clues to future trajectories for women’s and gender studies in the country through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary survey of intersectionalities in feminist activism and theory; gender, caste and class; feminist, masculinity, queer and transgender studies; disability and feminism; feminist and queer pedagogies; and Indian, Western and transnational feminisms. The volume traces how gender studies have shaped established social science as well as interpretative and representational discourses (psychoanalysis, literature, aesthetics, cinema, new media studies and folklore). It examines their strategic potential to draw upon and transform these areas in national and international contexts.

This book will be useful to students, teachers and researchers in women’s studies, gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies and South Asian studies.

chapter |20 pages

Introduction

Women’s and gender studies at the crossroads

part I|69 pages

Stirrings, across time and place

chapter 1|7 pages

(How) ‘to be or not to be’

Women’s and gender studies in India today

chapter 2|13 pages

Feminist crossings in time and space

The question of culture

chapter 3|12 pages

Dynamics of the women’s movement and women’s studies in India

An evolutionary perspective

chapter 4|11 pages

Intersections of gender, caste and class

Agenda building in the Indian women’s movement

chapter 5|13 pages

Beyond essentialism

Ecofeminism and the ‘friction’ between gender and ecology

part II|102 pages

Interleaves

chapter 8|18 pages

Masculinity, sexuality and culture

Entangled narratives

chapter 9|9 pages

Pride and prejudice

Intersectional perspectives on identity formation through Indian pride events

chapter 10|14 pages

(Dis)ability, gender and identity

Crossing boundaries

chapter 11|13 pages

Gender, caste and Indian feminism

The case of the Women’s Reservation Bill

part III|65 pages

In-disciplinarities

chapter 13|17 pages

Feminism across disciplines

From Plato’s Academy to the streets of Delhi

chapter 15|10 pages

Transgender studies in india

Locating folklore and autobiographies as transgressive sites

chapter 16|12 pages

Crafting spaces at new intersections

In search of psychoanalytic feminism for India

chapter 17|11 pages

(Dis)respectable selfies

Honour, surveillance and the undisciplined girl

part IV|46 pages

Entwining feminism and pedagogy

chapter 18|10 pages

Working through the women’s and gender studies teaching machine

Notes on the way forward

chapter 19|21 pages

Blending in

Reconciling feminist pedagogy and distance education across cultures

chapter 20|13 pages

Disrupting the gender binary

Queering feminist pedagogy

part V|70 pages

Conversations across borders

chapter 21|21 pages

Transnational feminist crossings

On neo-liberalism and radical critique

chapter 22|15 pages

Globalization and Third Way theories

The beleaguered family and the marginalization of women

chapter 23|13 pages

When feminists sidestep the nation state

Transnational feminist journeys

chapter 24|19 pages

Queer and now

A roundtable forum with Dipika Jain, Akhil Kang, Sheena Malhotra, Hoshang Merchant, Shakthi Nataraj, Chayanika Shah, Nishant Shahani, Oishik Sircar and Ruth Vanita