A Wide Canvas

Like other existential crises or questions, feminist dilemmas too are fraught with the need to forge an adequate praxis for the individual feminist and for the collective consciousness that we have learnt to describe as feminist. These dilemmas encompass a wide canvas of issues ranging from epistemology and morality to the concerns of change and transformation. An important axis on which one of these dilemmas is played out—across cultures—is women’s traditional roles as care givers in the private domain and their quest to free themselves of the burden of the same.

In academia, contemporary feminisms aim at developing interdisciplinary approaches to specific concerns pertaining to women and gender and also to wider issues relating to the world we inhabit. These approaches not only seek to inform reform and transform disciplinary practices from feminist locations and standpoints but also aim to establish women’s studies as a separate discipline in itself. On the other hand, contemporary feminisms also aim to open feminist scholarship to be informed by shifts in the disciplinary canons of the academia, be it the sciences, the social sciences or the humanities. This two way relationship is rough but necessary—if both have to grow critically. Realizing that these are not either/or choices feminist academics continue to forge their way to disrupt disciplines in an Irigarian sense, on different axes, both from within and from the outside.