South Asian Feminisms Research Articles

<i>Shaheen Bagh</i> (2021): Gender, Affects, and Ita Mehrotra’s Graphic Narrative of Protest

Ita Mehrotra’s journalistic memoir, <i>Shaheen Bagh: A Graphic Recollection</i> (2021), through the graphic narrative medium, facilitates a reading of the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, particularly those in Delhi, as pivoting on affective strategies. This article argues how the women of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi mobilised affects primarily through the following activities – sharing food, singing songs and the display of artwork. The article explores: What role does the graphic narrative genre of Mehrotra’s book play in the representation of affective strategies used in the Shaheen Bagh protests? And since Shaheen Bagh was considered remarkable because the organisers were Muslim women (Verde and Kumar, 2020, n. p.), how does the study of gender and ethnicity in relation to affective strategies contribute to this proposed reading? This article is situated within the intersecting discourses of South Asian Feminisms, Contemporary South Asian literature, and Affect Theory.

Men in the Home: Everyday Practices of Gender in Twentieth-Century India

Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 403 Gyanendra Pandey Men in the Home: Everyday Practices of Gender in Twentieth-Century India This article responds to a call by feminist historians of South Asia to attend to the “complex experience of family” as conditioned by age, gender, and class, and the ordinary “daily practices of gender” in the domestic arena.1 My essay focuses on the comparatively neglected aspect of men’s domesticity—their performance of life in the home—as revealed in the writings and practices of prominent nationalist thinkers and activists who lived and worked in an era of militant anticolonial agitation in India. The domestic sphere, with its assigned gender roles and routines, was at the heart of major debates between the colonizers and the colonized about the meaning of culture and enlightenment. “Among rude people, the women are generally degraded; among civilized people they are exalted,” James Mill declared, in his classic statement on domestic manners .2 From Mill, writing in the second decade of the nineteenth century , to Katherine Mayo in the third decade of the twentieth, colonialist 1. Indrani Chatterjee, introduction to Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, ed. Indrani Chatterjee (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 4; Mrinalini Sinha, “A Global Perspective on Gender: What’s South Asia Got to Do with It?” in South Asian Feminisms, ed. Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 359. 2. James Mill, The History of British India, 4th ed. (1817), edited by H. H. Wilson, vol. 1 (London: James Madden, 1848), 309. 404 Gyanendra Pandey writers dredged up the condition of women, familial relations, and domestic life in India to demonstrate the necessity of colonialist-initiated improvement and reform.3 Colonial rule thus provided the impetus for “a thoroughgoing re-evaluation of Indian ‘tradition’ along lines more consonant with [a] ‘modern’ economy and society.”4 Faced with insistent colonial critique, nationalist reformers and thinkers set out to controvert suppositions about the fallen state of Indian women and the oppressiveness of Indian homes. They also further sought to ameliorate conditions where these had deviated from their version of a glorious past. The Hindi/Urdu writer Premchand sums up the nationalist rebuttal in a 1931 essay entitled “Nari-jati ke adhikar” (“The Rights of Women”): “In fact, the Indian woman has always been considered the goddess of the home, and she has a higher status than men in the society .” For a variety of reasons, Premchand suggests, women fell from this preeminent position over time and men began to appropriate the established rights of women. “But,” he concludes, “the [new] wave of nationalism and enlightenment that has arrived now will obliterate all these [gender] distinctions, and our mothers [sic] will be re-installed in the exalted place that is their right.”5 It was in this way that early nationalist thinkers and spokespersons produced an argument about the existence of a sacred and relatively uncolonized “inner” space of Indian society, as contrasted with a more quickly changing, compromised, and negotiated “outer” space. In what is now a familiar precept in South Asian gender history, women were cast as the (predominant) custodians of “tradition” in private and in public life; men were (predominantly) the instruments of national, social, and cultural transformation in the wider, public domain. With this framing came propositions about the need for rapid progress in the “outer” realms of science, industry, and voluntary association as well as the later goals of welfare and development, secularism, and socialism. The push 3. Ibid.; Katherine Mayo, Mother India (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927). 4. Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 88. Mani makes a powerful critique of the so-called “Indian tradition” and of claimed colonial efforts to improve Indian society. 5. Premchand, “Nari-jati ke adhikar,” in Vividh Prasang, vol. 3, ed. Amrit Rai (Allahabad, India: Hans Prakashan, 1980) 249. Gyanendra Pandey 405 for such advancements developed alongside a more guarded approach to change in the “inner” world and its inherited store of spiritual resources— symbolized above all...

An Interview with Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul

Ania Loomba and Suvir Kaul are leading figures in Anglo-American and Indian literary studies, bringing a radical political sensibility to the understanding of Renaissance and eighteenth-century writing, as well as to contemporary postcolonial literary cultures. Loomba’s Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, opened up new fields of inquiry by interpreting Renaissance literary texts in relation to issues of race and colonialism, and her subsequent books have continued to pursue such critical questions in highly original directions — Postcolonial Shakespeares (co-edited with Martin Orkin), Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism, Race in Early Modern England, and Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies (co-edited with Melissa Sanchez). In parallel with her work on early modern culture, Loomba has definitively shaped debates in postcolonial and South Asian studies in Colonialism/Postcolonialism, South Asian Feminisms (co-edited with Ritty A. Lukose) and her latest book, Revolutionary Desires. Kaul has written three discipline-transforming books relating eighteenth-century British literary culture to its formative colonial contexts: Thomas Gray and Literary Authority, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire and Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. His simultaneous interest in the recent political histories of India and Kashmir is expressed in the well-received and widely cited edited collections The Partitions of Memory and Of Gardens and Graves: Essays on Kashmir; Poems in Translation. Loomba and Kaul’s Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (co-edited with Antoinette Burton, Matt Bunzl and Jed Esty) remains the most vivid and engaging interdisciplinary overview of the field. Both currently teaching in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Loomba and Kaul visited London in the summer of 2018, and were interviewed on 4 June by David Johnson at the Open University in Camden.

South Asian Feminisms. Edited by Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012. 422 pp. $99.95 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

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South Asian Feminisms. Edited by Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities. Edited by Srila Roy. London: Zed, 2012.Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. By Naisargi N. Dave. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Review. Edited by Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. . Edited by Srila Roy. London: Zed, 2012. South Asian Feminisms. Edited by Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities. Edited by Srila Roy. London: Zed, 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. By Naisargi N. Dave. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.Amy BhattAmy BhattUniversity of Maryland, Baltimore County Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 40, Number 1Autumn 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/676963 Views: 262Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Subaltern Feminisms: Rethinking Politics, Praxis, and Theory from the Margins

Subaltern Feminisms:Rethinking Politics, Praxis, and Theory from the Margins Sanjam Ahluwalia (bio) Setsu Shigematsu. Screams From the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 271 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8166-6759-8 (pb). Mina Roces. Women’s Movements and the Filipina, 1986-2008. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012. 277 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8248-3499-9 (cl). Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose, eds. South Asian Feminisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 422 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8223-5179-5 (pb). The books under review enrich the global component within feminist scholarship, centering non-western histories, struggles, and debates on issues of gender, sexuality, reproduction, violence, religion, nation, globalization, trafficking, imperialism, and neo-liberalism. Reflecting the intellectual and political vibrancy of feminist scholarship on, from, and about Asia and its connections with the wider world, Roces’s and Shigematsu’s monographs focus on the Philippines and Japan, while Loomba and Lukose’s volume concentrates on the South Asian countries of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Each of these studies refuses the ahistoricity of the linear model of “waves” dominant within western feminist thought, highlighting instead the intellectual and political energies that have galvanized feminist theorizing and actions within the non-Atlantic-centered margins. They also demonstrate the impossibility of grasping historical experiences of and from the margins through a template derived from a universalized western location. By focusing on the indigeneity of feminist thought within non-western locations, these texts present alternatives to the provincial and reified articulations of gender within dominant Euro-Anglo-American feminisms. As a non-western “first world” capitalist economy, Japan occupies a particular positionality of “in-betweenness.” While Japan is a dominant player in Asia, its non-white and non-western status marks its socio-cultural marginality within the larger geopolitical arena. Shigematsu’s monograph on Uman ribu, the Japanese women’s liberation movement in the 1970s, foregrounds Japan’s in-betweenness while also globalizing the history of feminisms. In tracing ribu’s genealogies, fissures, and contradictions, Shigematsu [End Page 186] deploys “a kind of transdisciplinary and translocational” approach (xviii). Japanese feminists, Shigematsu argues, did not operate exclusively within the insular intellectual and political boundaries of the nation. Ribu’s radical feminism is situated within an interlocking scalar framework, where its “Japaneseness” does not necessarily mean relinquishing its “multiplicity of origins and points of connections, within and beyond the nation” (xxvi). In Shigematsu’s reading of radical feminist politics via a Japanese lens, the dominant Anglo-American script of feminist theorizing is effectively defamiliarized. Such Japanese theorists of radical feminism as Tanaka Mitsu are not simplistically presented as mere additions to our historical cast, though that contribution is not insignificant given how often non-western thinkers remain invisible within the western feminist canon. Focusing on Tanaka Mitsu and her contemporaries, Shigematsu pushes open the range of gender, sexual, and political issues impacting women in non-western locations. In the innovative resolutions, strategies, and articulations Japanese women furnished to address feminist issues, they drew from and negotiated their localized histories and experiences, which in turn unfolded within an interconnected world. Urban bourgeois Japanese feminists in the 1960s and 1970s organized around issues of women’s sexuality, reproduction, violence, imperialism, and left-wing politics. The “Liberation of the Toilet,” or the manifesto of the ribu women, through its “explicit, sexual, and vulgar language,” simultaneously sought to politicize sexualized subjectivities of Japanese housewives and comfort women. The manifesto declared: “The chastity of the wives of the military nation and the dirtied pussies of the ‘comfort women’ are both two extremes of a structure of consciousness that denies sex” (18). Ribu politics were sharply attuned to recognize the ideological loops that connected the romanticized and idealized national constructions of the peace-loving Japanese mother with state-sanctioned sexual aggression against other colonized Asian women (19). Ribu activism and theory unpacked the overlapping and tangled organizational logic of patriarchal power structured along axes of sexuality, reproduction, and imperialism. The ribu’s slogan on women’s procreative capacities called for “the creation of a society where we want to give birth.” Ribu women were seeking a wider socio-cultural transformation...

3 * Feminisms

This chapter reviews a selection of significant books on the topic of feminisms, published in 2012. Their differences in aims, approach, context and tone are of interest, but so too is the broad concern they share with illustrating the centrality of a feminist outlook in understanding contemporary global issues. The chapter is divided into five sections: 1. Introduction; 2. Necessary Feminisms, which reviews Christina Scharff’s Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World and Danielle Bouchard’s A Community of Disagreement: Feminism in the University; 3. Global Feminisms, which covers Srila Roy’s (ed.) New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities, Urszula Chowaniec and Ursula Phillips’ (eds) Women’s Voices and Feminism in Polish Cultural Memory, and Setsu Shigematsu’s Scream from the Shadows: The Women’s Liberation Movement in Japan; 4. Feminisms, Technology and Media, which considers Michelle Murphy’s Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health and Technoscience, Krista Geneviève Lynes’s Prismatic Media, Transnational Circuits: Feminism in a Globalised Present, and Natalie Purcell’s Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary: The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Hardcore Pornography; 5. Conclusion.

Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco by Zakia Salime, and: South Asian Feminisms ed. by Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose (review)

Between Feminism and Islam: Human Rights and Sharia Law in Morocco by Zakia Salime, and: South Asian Feminisms ed. by Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose (review)

South Asian feminisms

South Asian feminisms

Negotiating New Terrains: South Asian Feminisms

Negotiating New Terrains: South Asian Feminisms