Trespass, impasse, collaboration: Doing research on women's rights in India (original) (raw)
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Feminist politics in India: Women, identity and political activism
The equality of men and women in the matter of right has been established by a large number of the Constitutions, codes and laws. The real question is to what extent the legal declaration about the equality of the sexes has been effective in real life. It is globally acknowledged that 'gender equality and women's empowerment' is at the core of achieving development objectives, fundamental for the realisation of human rights, and key to effective and sustainable development outcomes. The bitter truth is that in India, which still requires schemes like 'Beti Bachao Beti Padhao' against the most horrific societal discriminations like female foeticide, women are treated as 'second class citizens' and denied their rights; hence their political status has remained relatively low. No doubt, various constitutional amendments, Acts are able to create a political space for women but they are not capable to guarantee a non-discriminatory environment for women to participate. Constitutional provisions do not mean automatic enjoyment of the rights conferred therein. This study stresses that women are still second-class citizens in spite of the equal rights conferred on them and seeks to identify the challenges of women in political leadership positions in India, the largest democratic nation. Findings from the study reveal that there is considerable progress in women's equality in the leadership role; however, there are certain crucial obstacles that still exist for women to be active in the political realm.
Choosing the worst one? Differentiating oppression in the Indian Women’s movement
In this paper, I will be looking at the history of the women’s movement in India, as documented by the women studies researchers, to see how oppression has received a degree of hierarchisation within the movement as well as within the public discourse in the country. Differentiating between the good violence and the bad violence, the urgent and the not-so-urgent, and the ethically more acceptable and less acceptable have led to a steady degree and form of hierarchical understanding of women’s oppression in the country within the movement itself. Through a blend of discourse analysis and interviews, I will be using the secondary literature available on the history of the women’s movement as well as semi-structural interviews conducted with student activists from leftist organisations in an Indian university. The literature will show how this hierarchy is at work in areas as varied as legal counselling for domestic violence to issues at focus in conflict areas such as Kashmir. The interviews will show this differentiation in praxis in the progressive frameworks of student organisations. By using this two prong approach, I intend to reflect on how the hierarchisation of oppression has been affecting not only adversely affecting the strategy building process of the women’s movement, but real lives and experiences that should compel us to rethink.
The last 50 years of feminist activism in India has managed to challenge the 5,000 years of patriarchal order. The main achievements were the deconstruction of violence against women, questioning of male domination within the family, kinship, religion, media and the State, in addition to a series of legal reforms. Understanding of privilege to reshape the world has been the distinct contribution of the feminist movement along with the focus on the marginalised. The feminist space in India is distinctive and builds upon a diversity of women’s groups, political party networks, feminist and HIV/AIDS-related NGOs, nonfunded feminist and queer groups and individuals, democratic rights groups, eco-feminists, non-feminists, research institutes and universities. Despite the broad experience, this space remains rather disunited.
Gender & Society, 2020
There is an abundance of books on Indian feminisms. These books have been published in multiple Indian languages for many decades. If we added writing on women's issues-writing that rejects or distances itself from the label feminism-then the history of writing on this subject goes back for centuries. It is still fascinating to read this book on Indian feminisms, and develop a deeper understanding of the political developments unfolding in India today. Since there are so many strands of feminist writing in India, there is always a dynamic conflict about whose views are represented, which audiences the writings target, and, ultimately, what each approach contributes to our understanding of feminisms. In her introduction, Poonam Kathuria describes the book as a collective account of activism at the nexus of government interests in establishing mechanisms for women's jurisprudence and feminist interests in pushing ideas of gender rights and justice across intersecting political, civil, social, economic, and cultural rights terrains. The chapters are by activists who draw upon theories they developed based on their practice. For feminists located in academia, this book is not an introduction to the current Indian theories of feminisms, is not about debates about knowledge hierarchies, or about methodological-linguistic, historical, regional-nationalisms. However, the book is a very significant contributor to all of those themes because it focuses on understandings of feminism, the spaces in which it is practiced, who are engaged in the struggles, how leadership develops, the victories and the defeats, and most of all the coalitions and fragmentations within and across spaces of activism within a variety of situated contexts. The book can also be read as a history of struggles, since the 1980s, on issues of violence, family-focused laws, feminist jurisprudence, and, above all, about questions of personhood.
Political Feminism in India An Analysis of Actors, Debates and Strategies
the last 50 years of feminist activism in India has managed to challenge the 5,000 years of patriarchal order. the main achievements were the deconstruction of violence against women, questioning of male domination within the family, kinship, religion, media and the State, in addition to a series of legal reforms. understanding of privilege to reshape the world has been the distinct contribution of the feminist movement along with the focus on the marginalised. the feminist space in India is distinctive and builds upon a diversity of women’s groups, political party networks, feminist and HIV/AIDS-related nGos, nonfunded feminist and queer groups and individuals, democratic rights groups, eco-feminists, non-feminists, research institutes and universities. Despite the broad experience, this space remains rather disunited. Currently, there is a backlash to feminism, as major insights of women’s activism did not succeed in altering the fixed notions of gender roles and traditions. on the contrary, some of these have enjoyed a revival with marketisation and cultural traditionalism. there is a disconnect between theory and practice: study groups and human rights activists seem to work in silos, unlike in the 1970s when there was greater dialogue between the women’s movement and women’s studies. the gendering of citizenship requires us to question and challenge the fact that citizenship, a supposedly public identity, is produced and mediated by the supposedly private heterosexual patriarchal family. the ‘personal’ has become ‘political’ as it is completely submerged in power relations. Like any other structure of power, patriarchy too has an outside, which is what makes possible the different kinds of protests that constantly undermine it. Feminism today is the constant questioning of the world we perceive and the boundaries we encounter. the more we understand, the more we are able to build a narrative for change. there are innumerable new energies arising from different positions transforming the feminist field: new contestations of patriarchy, and new contestations of the normative feminism itself. It will be the interplay of fields that might change the system altogether.
At the margins of feminist politics? Everyday lives of women activists in northern India
Contemporary South Asia, 2006
This article draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in northern India on historically marginalised women’s political participation. In particular, it examines women party activists in Dalit politics and the possibilities for the existence of feminist politics in the spaces analysed dense with masculine powers, caste identity-driven politicians and women’s obstacles in building a political career for themselves. It is argued that these women present a theoretical impasse: labelling their practices as non-feminist would negatively connote the subjectivity and agency of those women who are engaged in different political worlds, even when they replicate dominant structures or embody traditions not exclusively based on the gendered individual as an actor or beneficiary of politics. Drawing from a comparison between women in Dalit politics and Hindu Right organisations, women activists are analysed through the lenses of their self-realisation trajectories, theirs and their political movements’ relationship (or the absence of such a relationship) with gender progressive agendas, and the individual and collective consequences of their mobilisation. In doing so, this article aims to offer a portrait of women’s political agency unconstrained by categories that, by themselves, might only offer partial explanations for everyday political life in a slum, a village or a state capital.
Decolonizing the Body : Theoretical Imaginings on the Fourth Wave Feminism in India
2017
This chapter argues that the 2012 anti-rape movement in India launched a new feminist politics that embodied a rights-based discourse of gender-in particular, against everyday, generalized misogyny, and sexual harassment and violence-in a way that had not been seriously taken up by the mainstream Indian Women's Movement. Asserting their right to be treated as equal fellow citizens, the movement saw young women challenging the subordination of their political identity to moral identity, and demanding that the state criminalize sexual harassment, something that it had ignored to do in the sixty-five years of the country's independence. Second, I claim that this feminist discourse was connected to a global vocabulary of rights facilitated, to a large extent, by means of the Internet. Third, this movement-often referred to as India's "Spring"-resonated with other forms of agitations for plurality and inclusivity within the Dalit and Muslim minority communities, educational institutions, and the country's militarized zones. It is my intention here to argue that this rights-based intersectional feminist movement, led by India's youth, created a ripple effect for other struggles to break out. Providing them with the "form, idiom, and languages of protest" (Anurima, 2017 fb post), it inspired a large number of public intellectuals and members of the civic society to lay claim to their "political citizenship" (Rahul Roy, 2017) and assert their constitutional right to shape the future of the country's secularism that they fear is currently under threat by the Hindutva forces of regressive nationalism. The promise of the 2012 feminist movement, therefore, is in this connection, and is a critical breakthrough that has the potential to lay the groundwork for, what I claim, an Indian fourth wave feminism and for wider class-based struggles. Central to this rights-bearing discourse of gender is a focus on the issues of freedom, choice, and desire i.e. elements, which in the past, were viewed with suspicion by those who were committed to the idea of developmental nationalism. The developmental state was too quick to dismiss these elements that came out of modernity because of its own postcolonial legacies marked by conservative gender binaries. The Indian Women's Movement, in its turn too, had a narrower set of restrictive and protectionist concerns by placing a limit on what women could ask for or do. Moreover, gender in the public sphere was seen by the IWM only through the lens of the
Feminist Theoretical Models: Questions from the Indian Context
In common parlance, a theory is mostly an idea or thought, a set of concepts or principles clarifying how some aspect of human behavior or performance is organized. When we talk of feminist theories, we understand it to be an extension of feminism into theoretical or philosophical discourse. The label ‗Indian' when used for feminist theories implies a political and cultural specificity. Indian feminism is clearly a response to issues concerning Indian women and the debates that have centered on the status of women. To explore how this debate has taken shape over the years this paper will explore the inevitable association with western feminism, the position of women in colonial and post -colonial India, and the challenges posed by globalization and the right wing ideology, the writings of prominent Indian academics and activists as they discuss feminism in the context of Indian culture, society and politics and explore its theoretical foundations in India. Feminism in India can be seen as a set of movements, legal reforms, social and cultural changes that have taken place over a period of time aimed at establishing and defending equal political, economic, social rights and equal opportunities for women in India. Apart from issues like right to work for equal wages, right to equal access to health and education and equal political rights feminism has also found culture specific issues within Indian patriarchal society. It has grappled in the past with issues such as the inheritance law, practice of widow immolation, child marriage, Dowry deaths and of late problems of domestic violence, sexual harassment at workplace, rape, honor killings, abortion and pro-life pro-choice debates, LGBT issues, the definition of family and the questions of family values, sexuality and religion, discriminatory practices against women in the unorganized sectors, isolation of the tribal and dalit women from the so called mainstream feminist agendas among other such issues.