Understanding Reproductive Health Services in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India: A Dalit Feminist Approach

The identity of women cannot be seen in isolation but one that exists along with other constituents that intersects with class, race, sexuality and caste also. Being a woman, a person is already at periphery, adding caste to it makes more vulnerable. Thus, Dalit women are more subjugated in Indian society whether it is about leading a normal life or availing reproductive health services. This study primarily draws from a Dalit feminist perspective to understand the subjectivity and nuisances of the Dalit women who avail reproductive health services. While availing reproductive health services, the sort of discrimination the Dalit women face are denial in providing reproductive health services, creating and observing distance with the Dalit women by the health practitioners, and also promotion of privatization of healthcare services. The study is based on qualitative research design basically, participant observation, in which the total 27 married women were selected for the in-depth interview, among them 16 women were from the Dalit community and 9 women were from the so-called upper caste community. This research was conducted from February to April 2015 in Mau district of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, India.

The need for a Dalit feminist position is deeply rooted in the structural and generational experience of discrimination that Dalit women face—both within and outside the broader Dalit movement and Indian feminism. As Bama Faustina Susairaj highlights, the Dalit identity carries a stigma that persists regardless of social mobility, education, or professional success. Dalit women, in particular, experience layers of oppression: they are marginalized not only within the broader caste hierarchy but also within their own communities and religious institutions, as seen in Bama’s experiences inside the Christian convent. This reinforces the argument that Dalitness is not just a category—it is an ongoing, deeply embedded institution shaped by multiple factors like geography, language, socioeconomic status, religion, and gender. Mainstream Indian feminism, often dominated by upper-caste voices, has historically failed to address the unique struggles of Dalit women, assuming a universal experience of womanhood that ignores caste-based oppression. Similarly, Dalit politics, while focused on caste liberation, has not always prioritized gender-specific issues within Dalit communities. This makes a separate Dalit feminist position crucial: it acknowledges that Dalit women’s voices, lived realities, and activism must be recognized independently to challenge both caste and gender oppression. A Dalit feminist perspective ensures that the intricate and intersectional nature of discrimination is addressed, rather than being overshadowed by broader feminist or Dalit movements. It is a necessary stand against caste patriarchy, making space for empowerment and visibility in a system where Dalit women are often erased or sidelined. With this perspective in mind this paper assays the need for a Dalit Feminist Position and in respect to it the place that Dalit feminist literature in general and Dalit women’s autobiographies in particular hold in that arena.

As the lowest in the caste hierarchy, Dalits in Indian society have historically suffered caste-based social exclusion from economic, civil, cultural, and political rights. Women from this community suffer from not only discrimination based on their gender but also caste identity and consequent economic deprivation. Dalit women constituted about 16.60 percent of India’s female population in 2011. Dalit women’s problems encompass not only gender and economic deprivation but also discrimination associated with religion, caste, and untouchability, which in turn results in the denial of their social, economic, cultural, and political rights. They become vulnerable to sexual violence and exploitation due to their gender and caste. Dalit women also become victims of abhorrent social and religious practices such as devadasi/jogini (temple prostitution), resulting in sexual exploitation in the name of religion. The additional discrimination faced by Dalit women on account of their gender and caste is clearly reflected in the differential achievements in human development indicators for this group. In all the indicators of human development, for example, literacy and longevity, Dalit women score worse than Dalit men and non-Dalit women. Thus, the problems of Dalit women are distinct and unique in many ways, and they suffer from the ‘triple burden’ of gender bias, caste discrimination, and economic deprivation. To gain insights into the economic and social status of Dalit women, our paper will delve more closely into their lives and encapsulate the economic and social situations of Dalit women in India. The analyses of human poverty and caste and gender discrimination are based on official data sets as well as a number of primary studies in the labor market and on reproductive health.

What About the Boys? The Importance of Including Boys and Young Men in Sexual and Reproductive Health Research

Moving from awareness to action on preventing patient exposure to toxic environmental chemicals

Dalit women in Indian society are triply exploited on the basis of caste, class and gender. In this context after defining the term Dalits sociologically this paper attempts to establish that Dalit women are different from general caste women on the basis of their structural location, occupations they perform and treatment meted out to them by society in general. The paper captures the existing prejudice and contempt against Dalit women which in a way gets articulated by the atrocities committed on them by the so-called upper castes. The paper explores how Mayawati has become an icon of the Dalit society by deconstructing many established images of Dalit and general caste women. We have tried to understand why the Indian media has failed to appreciate her achievements in full glory. Last but not the least why has the Indian women's movement not accepted Mayawati as part of it and defend her from onslaughts of media and prejudices of caste in the male-dominated society?

Especially since the political turmoil of the 1990s, scholars have focused on the marginalized histories of Dalit (“Untouchable”) communities in India. Yet these investigations also concentrated exclusively on the male Dalit community. Only recently, however, scholars have focused their attention on Dalit women as “subjects” of study. Dalits are dominated and dominating at the same time. My article examines Dalit women's lifeworlds under double patriarchy in colonial and post‐colonial India to highlight the contributions of scholars in understanding how different Dalit women are negotiating, challenging, politicizing, and transforming conditions of their discriminated Dalit status: as sexed women and caste Dalit. I theorize and focus on ways “new” Dalit women engaged with the incremental intersecting technologies of caste, class, gender, sexuality, and community to carve out their subjectivity, agency, respectability, and honor in modern India. To this end, I dwell on a variety of themes—generative gender and “new” Dalit women, upper‐caste prejudice, community, patriarchy, honor, and formal education to illuminate the changing sociality and complexities of Dalit women's worlds. My review article demonstrates that Dalit women's universal perspectives and historical and political practices are deeply democratic and as such have the potential of engaging in inclusive and productive politics, building solidarities, and actually reshaping the larger fields of South Asian Studies, India Studies, Dalit Studies, and Gender Studies.

This dissertation is a critical feminist analysis of the discourses, narratives and hegemonic power structures that define Dalit women's lives in Kerala, India. It focuses on intergenerational narratives of women and girls to illuminate how Dalit communities navigate development by specifically focusing on their educational narratives. To explore Dalit narratives, I conducted fieldwork in Kerala using in-depth interviews, photovoice, and participant observation as primary data. I coupled my primary data with secondary data sources such as development reports, trend data and newspapers to document how Dalit needs are framed. This research uses postcolonial feminist theory as it applies to the Kerala context along with intersectionality of identities as a conceptual framework to understand how gender, class, caste and religion shape Dalit women's education across different generations.;The findings of this study speak to three specific themes: (1) the material and social locations held by women and girls in the Dalit communities, (2) the neoliberal forces shaping Kerala's education, and (3) the patriarchal forces in the context of marriage and gender-based violence in Dalit homes, communities and schools. This research exposes the gendered subjectivities and vulnerabilities that Dalit women navigate through resistance, agency and power. Thus, by offering a contextualized place-based study of Dalit lives in Kerala, I argue that the discourses and practices of development in Kerala have failed to attend to Dalit needs.

The women particularly from Dalit community are doubly under-shadowed in Khagendra Sangraula’s novel Junkiriko Sangeet [The Music of the Firefly]. The novel shows how women from Dalit community are tortured by their male partners and people from the so-called high caste people. The objective of this article is to study discrimination of Dalit women based on their caste, economic status and gender as women. The novel deals with the issue of Dalit, particularly Dalit women who have been physically and mentally exploited by upper caste people. This study shows how high caste people give stereotype identity to low caste people in order to impose their power over them. Sangraula depicts the harsh reality of Simring village where Dalit woman is fed stool and drunken men’s urine accusing her doing black magic. The Dalit women have no unity and some level of conscious to raise voice against such inhuman act. Therefore, their voice remains unheard. To analyze the issue explored above, this article takes theoretical ideas from Subaltern Studies, particularly from Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak, Gramsci and Foucault. The scholars of Subaltern Studies believe that subaltern group of people lack their own true representor which is the cause of remaining their issue at the bottom of social hierarchy. Some scholars believe that subaltern studies groups are like new historians who have to create discourse in order to re-write history of history less subaltern group. This paper also rewrites the ignored history of history less Dalit and Dalit women in Nepal.

Resisting Injustice: Seeking New Ways to Speak! Aruna Gnanadason Dalit* women in India speak… they break centuries‐old “silences” that have been imposed on them by caste and patriarchy. They express themselves through asking new questions with political astuteness, through insightful analyses of the role caste plays in Indian society, and through new ways of defining poverty and economic injustice through a Dalit lens. They give voice to their struggles through protest marches and peaceful resistance. They also speak through art and music, through dances to the beat of the parai*, through verse, and through the retelling of ancient stories of their mothers and fathers and a courageous reconstruction of history. Dalit women have broken the silence, and they have the determination to tear through the shrouds of silence that have for too long covered up their broken bodies, shadowed their spirits, and scarred their souls. The Dalit woman is the doubly or even thrice oppressed in Indian society. She has been called “the dust of the dust”. Dalit women are ground to dust by the weight of systems legalized in British colonial times and by an oppressive patriarchal and caste hierarchy in India—a religiously sanctioned indigenous system that has considered Dalits as the “outcastes” in Indian society. Even as I write this paper, yet another incident of a brutal rape and murder of a Dalit woman is reported. A group of gangsters evidently from the family of the headman (and of an upper‐caste group) gang rape a Dalit woman (who is not named!) and tear her body to pieces and burn her in Malpara Village in Agra. Agra is the city where the Taj Mahal stands. This marble architectural wonder aptly called “a poem of love” was built in 1631 by the Mughal King Shah Jahan in memory of his beloved Mumtaz Mahal. And somewhere nearby an unnamed Dalit woman is raped, dismembered, and burnt! While the report does not tell us why this fate for her—as in other cases, one can only conjecture that she must have broken some upper‐caste law; polluted the supposedly common well by drawing water from it; or perhaps having the gumption to cross the landlord's house, thus breaking the “apartheid‐like” laws that govern the movement of Dalits; or it could have been a way to teach a lesson to her people for having the courage to speak up; it could also be because she dared to fall in love with a man of an upper caste; or simply because the group of upper‐caste men wanted to show their power and have some fun! As in such cases, the village headman and others tried to prevent the woman's husband from approaching the police and burned her mutilated body—so that all evidence is erased. The police promise action, some arrests are made… but we know that the culprits will soon be out. Those with privilege escape punishment once too often, especially when a woman is the victim. We read report after report of the rape and abuse of Dalit women and girls in the hands of landlords, managers, and masters in places they work as domestic workers. Just any man or woman in authority over Dalits of an upper‐caste group is able to hold Dalits at ransom; with threats of violence and other forms of pressure. Privilege, power, and wealth largely remain ensconced in the hands of a minority in India. Reclaiming history has become a strong political tool in the hands of Dalits in India—hence, a Dalit History month was effectively used by Dalits to voice their protest, to say their story and demand that they be heard. As Dalit poet Challapalli Swaroopa Rani writes: The day I was born I bore the imprint of an unchaste woman thrown into the drainage of traditions and dustbin of customs. I became the forbidden one. I am the one carrying the onus of age‐old rejections generations of humiliations as my legacy… In which canto of your country's famed history will you write it down, my story? Therefore, a Dalit History Month (April 2015) which declares in its announcement: Dalit History Month is a...

The present study focuses on the Dalit community in general and its women in particular as a muted group. The Dalit community is one of these marginalized communities who have been muted, deliberately, by society even in this era, the 21st century. Using a Muted Group Theory (MGT) as a conceptual standpoint, the study has attempted to problematize the caste system in today’s India and to prove the Dalit community as a muted group, which has been strategically muted for centuries and it goes on. The primary texts for analysis are Ants among Elephants (2017) by Sujatha Gilda, and The Weave of My Life (2008) by Urmila Pawar. The Weave of My Life, a memoir, recounts three generations of Dalit women who struggled to overcome the burden of their caste; the untouchables, the poorest class of Dalits, and Ants Among Elephants also deals with the fighting of Dalits with the issues of caste system in India. Both of these texts unearth the subjugation of Dalits, particularly, Dalit women, due to caste, gender, and language barriers. This study answers the questions of how the Dalit community is a muted group; and what ways are used to subjugate them in modern-day India. The study concludes with a need to write &study Dalit literature and to boost Dalit women in either possible way.

Background Given the substantial time adolescents spend online, sexual health promotion and education through online media constitute a promising public health action. However, monitoring of sexual health-related online media content is warranted, and considering the scope and aims of public service media, this forum can be regarded as being of particular interest. This study aimed to analyze how and to what extent sexuality and sexual health-related content targeting adolescents is communicated and portrayed in public service media in Finland, with a particular interest in health promotion perspectives and participatory practices. Methods Based on predetermined inclusion criteria and guidance from professionals at the Finnish public service company Yle, podcasts were specified as the media format of interest. Three Finnish podcasts (a total of 66 episodes) produced during the years 2021-2023, targeting young people and focusing on sexual health, were included in this study and subject to critical content analysis. Results Most podcast episodes focused equally on the sexual health resource and risk perspectives, while a third emphasized a resource perspective. Concerning participatory practices, adolescents participate in only five episodes in total, and most often, the podcast hosts’ own experiences are at the center of the episodes. Conclusions The findings highlight how sexuality and sexual health content is communicated in public service media podcasts targeting adolescents in Finland, as well as how the communication aligns with health education and promotion guidelines. The study sheds light on participatory practices, emphasizing a lack of stakeholder involvement, i.e., dialogue between podcast hosts and listeners. Results carry implications for developing sexual health promotion through public service media targeting young people in Finland and other European countries alike. Key messages • The findings highlight how sexuality and sexual health content is portrayed in public service media podcasts in Finland and how the communication aligns with health promotion values and principles. • The findings show a lack of participatory practices in Finnish public service media podcasts targeting adolescent sexual health - a health promotion concern also pertinent to other countries.

This chapter outlines the positioning of Dalit women in the historical context and defines ways in which Dalit women envision success. It is an attempt to review the legislation and social action for the emancipation of the Dalit community. Have these efforts been successful in their objective to eradicate entrenched gender and caste based notions of (in)equality and (in)justice? Have they been effective enough to bring empowerment and success to women? The need of Dalit women for personal security, education, socio-economic development and social justice are priority areas for intervention. In order to understand the reality of Indian society in general, and of the Dalit community and Dalit women in particular, an analysis of caste–class–gender dynamics is imperative. Success as a notion for Dalit women can then be divined only upon understanding and incorporating political, cultural and social histories into contemporary narratives of women’s lives. Through the life experiences of Dalit women, we will explore some autobiographical narratives for their notions of success. The historical disadvantage faced by the Dalit community, added to the disadvantage of being women, becomes a powerful demonstration of resistance to the objective of gaining success in life.

Background Adolescents spend more time online than ever before and refer to media as their primary source for information on sexual health. Furthermore, studies show that health communication through media is an effective health promotion method, reaching a large scale of the population. Therefore, sexual health promotion through media is a promising public health action. Hence, this study aimed to analyze how and to what extent sexuality and sexual health-related content targeting adolescents is communicated in public service media in Finland and Sweden. Methods A critical content analysis will be performed focusing on public service media content highlighting sexuality and sexual health-related topics. Public service media content that has been published in Finnish or Swedish during the last 10 years (2013-2022) and targeting adolescents aged 10-19 years old is included in the study. Results The preliminary results shed a light on sexuality and sexual health content in public service media, presenting an overview of what content (themes) is communicated to adolescents, how the communication takes place (channels and formats) and to what extent the theme is prevalent and promoted in Finland and Sweden. The results furthermore highlight the evidence-base informing the production of media content and also illustrate eventual differences in sexuality and sexual health content between the countries. Conclusions The findings contribute to the limited knowledge about the media image that is communicated to young people with regard to sexuality and sexual health in Finland and Sweden with regards to both structural and content-related issues, as well as underscoring the opportunities for developing sexual health promotion through public service media. Key messages • The findings highlight similarities and differences in sexuality and sexual health content targeting adolescents in public service media in Finland and Sweden. • The findings highlight how sexuality and sexual health content is prevalent and structured in public service media as well as how it is connected to health promotion.

A Call for Comprehensive, Disability- and LGBTQ-Inclusive Sexual and Reproductive Health Education