Author: Eminent Contributors
Editor(s): Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan / Anupma Rao
Publisher: Kali/Women Unlimited
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 377
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188965-20-0
Description
By selecting important texts, published for the most part in the last decade, that elaborate and advance our understanding of the relationship between caste and gender, this seminal volume provides a succinct account of the caste and gender debate/discourse and a perspective on the theoretical tendencies that determine its frames of reference.
Gender & Caste is the first volume of a seminal new series - Issues in Contemporary Indian Feminism - that will serve as a point of entry and a guide to complex and often contentious debates in Indian feminism. These volumes will construct an archive of writing relating to gender issues in India and make an important contribution to contemporary feminist theory.
Most of the essays selected have emerged in the context of a renewed national debate about the politics of caste inaugurated by the Mandal decision in 1989 - a decision that produced a profound transformation of the political debates around caste and identity. It reiterated demands for social justice by dalits and lower castes that has consequently changed their political relationship to upper-caste elites.
Dalit-bahujan feminists have gone further than merely arguing that Indian feminism is incomplete and exclusive. Rather, they are suggesting that we rethink the genealogy of Indian feminism in order to engage meaningfully with dalit women's "difference" from the ideal subjects of feminist politics.
Contents
Series Note
Introduction
DALIT WOMEN, DIFFERENCE, and DALIT WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS
We Made History, Too: Women in the Early Untouchable Liberation Movement
Dalit Movement and Women's Movement
Dalit Women Talk Differently
Why I am not a Hindu
A Dalit Feminist Standpoint
Unsociability and Dalit Women Oppression
Dalit Women's Cry for Liberation
VOICE, LITERATURE
Pan on Fire: Eight Dalit Women Tell Their Stories
On a Dalit Woman's Testimonio
The Subaltern Speaks
HISTORY & ANTHROPOLOGY
The Women's Question in the Dravidian Movement
Reconceptualising Gender: Phule, Brahmanism and Brahmanical Patriarchy
Periyar, Women and an Ethic of Citizenship
Dr Ambedkar and the Empowerment of Women
Dalit Women in Western Ethnography
Caste and Women
VIOLENCE & SEXUALITY
Caste and Gender: Understanding Dynamics of Power and Violence
The Impossible Subject: Caste and the Gendered Body
Understanding Sirasgaon: Notes Towards Conceptualising the Role of Law, Caste and Gender in a Case of " Atrocity"
LAND & LABOR
The Downtrodden among the Downtrodden: An Interview with a Dalit Agricultural Laborer
Of Land and Dalit Women
Unmusical Chairs
Head-loads and Heartbreak
The Hindu Code Bill for the Liberation of Women
Appendix
Bibliography
Contributors