Inside/out: women’s movement and women in movements

Abstract

ABSTRACTAbout 20 years after Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana’s acclaimed essay ‘Problems for a contemporary Theory of Gender’ was written, suddenly women – of different ages, castes, classes, from diverse regions, and with various religious affiliations – have again taken the centre stage from the power corridors of policy-making to the debates in student organisations. In the last few years there has been an exponential increase in the coverage of violence against women in the media, several Government policies on the girl children have been launched, both sexual harassment and gender sensitisation have attained the status of everyday vocabulary amongst a significant section of the population, and yet feminism has remained a rather exclusive term from which the gentlefolk of urban India tends to keep a safe distance.The question remains, how do we make sense of this new visibility – which becomes glaring and blinding at the same time? Are we experiencing a resurgence in Women’s Movement? Is it a result of the nation-wide shockwave after the Delhi Gang rape in December 2012 when middle-class India came down to the streets? Is it the first wave of the new movements that are sweeping through university campuses and the ways in which new Dalit mobilisations are articulating economic and social rights? Is it connected to the visibility of protesting bodies on streets along with virtual solidarities in social media platforms, indicating debates on the layers of inequality and discrimination that accrue at this juncture of economic liberalisation and consumer culture? Probably it is all of them and more. This is an effort to engage with different ways of seeing, different genealogies of vision vis-à-vis gendered bodies in both public and private domains and explore the configurations of collective mobilisation around ‘women’s issues’. While voice and speech have been part of critical feminist discussions for the last three decades, the turn to visual constructions of gender is a recent one with brilliant but sporadic predecessors like Donna Harraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges’ (1988). This essay intends to conjoin vision with voice in understanding gender politics in India and unpack the ways in which multiple registers of women’s agency connect with each other.