Author: Eminent Contributors
Editor: Nivedita Menon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 539
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195658930
Description
This volume presents a comprehensive overview of feminist movement, theory and politics in India in the form of debates that emerged within the movement on key issues.
The women’s movement in India deals with a wide range of issues that impinge on women in different and significant ways. This volume presents a comprehensive overview of feminist movement, theory and politics in India in the form of debates that emerged within the movement on key issues. The introductory chapter provides an outline of the issues involved and their importance in understanding the politics of gender. The essays provide significant arguments on environment and gender, the effect of structural adjustment policies and new technologies on women and the engagement of feminism with law. The implication of feminist politics on other discourses within mainstream politics has been dealt with as also the feminist critique of imaginings of ‘community’ and state practices which deny validity to and loyalties other than to the state itself.
The book make stimulating reading for students of gender studies and those interested in the dynamics of the women’s movement as it exists in India today.
What is commendable about this volume is its insistence on giving voice to a variety of views and disciplines on gender issues.
— Contemporary South Asia
Such a collection of essays gives a fresh feminist perspective to various issues which compels the reader to redefine the ideologies and their impact on the women’s movement in India.
— The Statesman
By bringing together a few of the thoughtful, provocative, and erudite essays produced by an entire generation of Indian feminists, this volume does very good service to the Indian women’s movements as well as to scholarship on modern South Asia.
— The Journal of Asian Studies
Contents
Contributors
Introduction
PART I
GENDER AND ENVIRONMENT
Colonialism and the Evolution of Masculinist Forestry
Women, Ecology and Culture
The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons from India
PART II: WORK
Structural Adjustment, Feminization of Labor Force and Organizational Strategies
Impact of Technological Change on Industrial Women Workers
PART III: LAW
On Women, Equality and the Constitution: Through the Looking Glass of Feminism
Right Bodies and the Law: Rethinking Feminist Politics of Justice
PART IV: THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
Organizations and Autonomy
From Chipko to Sati: The contemporary Indian women’s Movement
Feminists, Women’s Movement, and the Working Class
PART V: WOMEN, COMMUNITY RIGHTS
Institutions, Beliefs, Ideologies: Widow Immolation in Contemporary Rajasthan
Communities as Political Actors: The Question of the Cultural Rights
PART VI: VICTIMHOOD/ AGENCY
Thumri as Feminine Voice
Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender
PART VII: SEXUALITY
Thinking Beyond Gender in India