Culture, Feminism, Globalisation

Taylor and Francis , 2010

By drawing out the ways in which the question of culture has been a significant part of not just women’s lives but of narratives of nation, language and politics in the Indian context, this essay urges feminists to study the particular elements that constitute Asian modernities and the translations that take place in terms of ideas, descriptions and practices. Focusing on the relationship between gender and culture, the essay argues for a rethinking of feminist politics and praxis, to serve the needs and concerns of the present, a present that includes both our lived experiences and the fields of enquiry that seek to illuminate them.

—Debates in India following on from the Shah Bano case highlight the extent to which gender equality may be compromised by yielding to the dominant voices within a particular religion or cultural tradition. As the Indian Supreme Court noted in Danial LatiW & Anr v Union of India, the pursuit of gender justice raises questions of a universal magnitude. Responding to those questions requires an appeal to norms that claim a universal legitimacy. Liberal feminist demands for a uniform civil code, however, have pitted feminist movements against proponents of minority rights and claims for greater autonomy for minority groups. Against the background of growing communal tensions and increasing Hinduization of politics, many feminists have argued for more complex strategies—strategies that encompass the diversity of women's lives and create a sense of belonging amongst women with diverse religious-cultural aYliations. Liberal theories of rights that abstract from the concrete realities of women's daily lives have not always addressed the institutions and procedures necessary to build that sense of belonging. This paper examines the contribution made by discourse ethics theorists to debates on models of multi-cultural arrangements. Deliberative models of democracy developed by discourse ethics theorists recognize the need for 'diVerence-sensitive' processes of inclusion, potentially assisting feminism in resolving the apparent conXict between the politics of multiculturalism and the pursuit of gender equality.

Revista Ártemis, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, Brazil, Volume 17, No, 1, pp. . 3-14. ISSN: 1807-8214. , 2014

The present paper looks at the challenges to feminism in the 21st century and gives a south Asian perspective. All over the world there has been a close link between the women’s movement and feminism, each inspiring and enriching the other. While the women’s movement is a much earlier phenomenon, the term Feminism is a modern one. Feminism comprises a number of social, cultural and political movements, theories and moral philosophies concerned with gender inequalities and equal rights for women. The present paper looks at the challenges to feminism in the South Asian region, with a special focus on India. These can be referred to as the three G’s - the attitude towards, Girl child, Gender violence and Globalization. South Asia is home to around a fifth of world population. Though today this region is characterized by high economic growth for the past 10-15 years yet poverty is also a reality along with illiteracy, backwardness and a large population. In the absence of a State support structure, the family plays a major role in this culture and this affects women more than men. All South Asian cultures are patriarchal. There is a lot of value placed on the birth of a son and one of the major problems facing the family today is the declining sex ratio. Gender-based violence is a universal reality of the South Asian region regardless of income, class and culture. The liberalization of the economy in the wake of Globalization in many South Asian countries has vastly diminished traditional livelihood means for the poor. The dominance of rich nations, multinational corporations and international capital over markets, resources and labour in the developing countries through trade, aid and technology transfer has greatly weakened the capacity of nation states and governments to promote human development and offer protection to the poor people. The paper concludes by stating that feminism is as relevant as ever before and the biggest challenge of 21st century feminism as to how do we integrate difference with an interdependent world.

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.

The pace of socio-economic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. In this volume we are concerned with examining how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. The 15 chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India conceive of these ongoing everyday transformatory churnings as undercurrents that play out well below the radar screen of the national and international media, and beyond the realm of the spectacular. To analyse these everyday transformatory churnings our authors look closely and ethnographically at a diversity of everyday 'sites of change in which macro-structural processes of social transformation interface with everyday life-worlds to generate new contestations and contradictions that impinge directly on the everyday lives of ordinary Indian women, and on the relations between genders. In doing so, they combine to identify the ambiguous, contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of social transformation. They also provide us with some cause for cautious optimism. Thus, while much of the current debate on women and social change in India is, for very good reasons, dominated by the pessimism triggered by the apparent increase in brutal sexualised violence against women, and the very low child sex ratio that makes India 'a terrible place for girls cf. also Jha et al. 2006;, the chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India paint a more composite and contradictory picture. The past 10 to 20 years have seen an increasing number of women moving out of the domestic domain and into the 'public' domains of education, work and politics (Reddy 2012); female literacy has gone up; more women pursue higher education and are an increasingly common sight on buses, in cafes, markets and other public spaces in the big cities; new and affordable communication technologies blur the gendered boundaries between the private and the public; there is greater participation of women in economic activity in the cities; the large number of women elected to village and municipal councils across the country give women a permanent political voice; there is a strong women's movement; and in some states women now 'out-vote' the men. These changes, we argue in this book, are deeply implicated in everyday lives and have had a considerable, if contradictory, impact on how Indian women and men live, work and dream. We have organised the 15 chapters in Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India under three topical headings: (1) Work, technology, aspirations; (2) democracy and the developmental state; and (3) assertions and activism. The key questions that we address include: How does women's ability to participate in an increasingly globalised and volatile Indian labour market alter the terrain upon which gender relations are negotiated and organised? How does the entry of new technologies into everyday life domains alter the relationship between men and women, and between the private and the public? How do global cultural flows impinge on local imaginaries and desires to reconfigure subjectivities? Does the growing policy focus on maternal health change local views of women and motherhood? How is contemporary Indian feminism articulated and contested? And how does women's grassroots political activism reconfigure gender relations and practices?

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.

Feminist Review, 2009

_________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract: In recent times, India has witnessed a number of protest movements that have interrogated, challenged and changed the practices and processes of its democratic functioning. The Pink Chaddi campaign has been one such popular agitation that has foregrounded the issue of access, equity and rights of women and its complex engagement with the discourse of development and the project of modernity. This essay examines just how 'radical' is this movement in creating and appropriating 'space' in the political, social and cultural matrix of postcolonial India and what is its relation with Indian feminism. The analysis is based on the premise that hardline majoritarian politics exercises its powerful control over women by fortifying spatial boundaries – the public domain for men and the private for women. The Pink Chaddi campaign may be read as a clearing of spaces to articulate women's rights, to disarm all forms of gendered power relations, and to raise consciousness about the need for gender parity for a truly equitable and developed society. This paper examines the politics of development and the project of modernity in post-independent India in relation to a recent protest movement of women, the Pink Chaddi campaign. It contextualizes the happening of these events by linking their subversive tendencies to the trespassing and appropriation of public spaces that have historically been the domain of change and activity brought on by Indian male. The paper examines the specific nature of this discursive challenge by Indian women in two ways. First, it tries to define the usurpation of male-centric space in terms of both its continuity as well as its opposition to a postcolonial agenda of the state that is rooted in patriarchy and masculinity. Second, it looks at how these forms of protest by women complicate the essential and normative understanding of contemporary Indian feminism. On the basis of these two strands the essay speculates on whether the emergence of such new ‗radical' movements launched by women signals the birth of transformative politics in postcolonial India, one that opens up the possibility for the 21 st century Indian women to go beyond the cultural boundaries imposed on her sexual expression and her rightful need for gender parity. Theorists of different ideological hues like Partha Chatterjee, Dipankar Gupta, Ashish Nandy and Chandra Talpade Mohanty have firmly established the fact that the nation-state produces a development discourse that is a highly gendered construct in terms of the idea and practice of citizenry. Citizenship, a supposedly public identity, is produced and mediated within the private space of a heterosexual patriarchal family. Feminist thought thus recognizes the patriarchal family as the basis for the secondary status of women in society, and hence the feminist slogan—‗The personal is the political'. As Nivedita Menon says in ‗Seeing like a Feminist', ―what is considered to be ‗personal' (the bedroom, the kitchen', has to be recognized as completely submerged in power relations, with significant implications for what is called ‗the public' (property, paid work, citizenship)—it is, therefore, ‗political'. Moreover, the subscription to citizenship in a nation-state such as India is fraught with several challenges: Who defines and sanctions the role of citizens in a free state? Are the rights of citizenship equally available to all sections of people irrespective of class, caste and gender? How do marginalized/ subaltern constituencies bereft of agency, access and equity fight for their rights? What of women, their freedom and their lives? Clearly, one of the agendas of the feminist movement in India has been to contest and break down the rigid boundaries that separate the masculinized domain of the public from the feminized space of the private. To lay claim and register their presence in the prohibitionary spaces of public domain is more than a gesture of tokenism; it is a radical liberatory move for women, another step forward towards the goal of true empowerment. In today's times, the breakaway of women from the regulated confines of domesticity and home

Revista Ártemis, 2014

The present paper looks at the challenges to feminism in the 21st century and gives a south Asian perspective. All over the world there has been a close link between the women's movement and feminism, each inspiring and enriching the other. While the women's movement is a much earlier phenomenon, the term Feminism is a modern one. Feminism comprises a number of social, cultural and political movements, theories and moral philosophies concerned with gender inequalities and equal rights for women. The present paper looks at the challenges to feminism in the South Asian region, with a special focus on India. These can be referred to as the three G's-the attitude towards, Girl child, Gender violence and Globalization. South Asia is home to around a fifth of world population. Though today this region is characterized by high economic growth for the past 10-15 years yet poverty is also a reality along with illiteracy, backwardness and a large population. In the absence of a State support structure, the family plays a major role in this culture and this affects women more than men. All South Asian cultures are patriarchal. There is a lot of value placed on the birth of a son and one of the major problems facing the family today is the declining sex ratio. Gender-based violence is a universal reality of the South Asian region regardless of income, class and culture. The liberalization of the economy in the wake of Globalization in many South Asian countries has vastly diminished traditional livelihood means for the poor. The dominance of rich nations, multinational corporations and international capital over markets, resources and labour in the developing countries through trade, aid and technology transfer has greatly weakened the capacity of nation states and governments to promote human development and offer protection to the poor people. The paper concludes by stating that feminism is as relevant as ever before and the biggest challenge of 21st century feminism as to how do we integrate difference with an interdependent world.