Gender Identities In Resisting Inequalities
Shefali Jha
UNSETTLING THE ARCHETYPES: FEMININITIES AND MASCULINITIES IN INDIAN POLITICS by Edited by Manuella Ciotti Women Unlimited, 2017, 273 pp., 550.00
May 2017, volume 41, No 5

Years of feminist research have taught   us that gender is a significant component of our identity. The script of gender may be provided by social norms but gender remains integral to how a self experiences his or her identity, as well as to how others identify one. Masculinity and femininity, as two dominant forms in which one’s gender identity is manifested, are the object of study in the articles being reviewed here. Manuella Ciotti’s edited Unsettling the Archetypes: Femininities and Masculinities in Indian Politics is a collection of articles which examines the effect on gender identities of political struggles of non-elite groups in Indian society and they negotiate their gender identity when they struggle against their non-elite status. Are they able to escape their subordinate status in one matrix of hierarchy only by aligning themselves with the symbols of dominance of another, gender based hierarchy? Or, does their fight against caste based domination, for example, also free them from the rigidity of the gender norms of their society? These articles show, as the editor puts it in her introduction, that in these struggles, ‘gender archetypes are sometimes reshuffled but at other times are painfully reinstated, … with the reproduction of unequal, violent and oppressive gender regimes by these agentic practices’ (pp. 19–20).

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