Gender/Women: What to include?
Arecurring question while I was choosing the books for this special issue on gender was: does one pick up books that analyse social formations and institutions, cultural meanings and practices, economy and polity, using gender as an analytical category or those which use ‘woman’ as a synonym for gender, attempting to alter, add, re-define existing knowledge and make a critical statement about the prevailing structural inequality? The collection before you (and part of the August issue since all the reviews could not be accommodated in this volume) reflects the eclectic and fraught terrain of variegated perspectives, methodologies and sources. Another consideration was to include books that are in close conversation with feminist ideas and share the commitment of feminist praxis, which may (not) analyse gender relations in a conventional sense but expand the scope to think about critical events, governance, performance, arts, literature, high politics, etc. This seemed like an exciting possibility to open up the remit of gender studies but also posed a challenging question with respect to delimitation of the field. I don’t have an answer to this; hence I am flagging it as a question here. A few selected books of this kind, nonetheless, have been included. (reviewed by Vrinda Grover, Sudha Tiwari and Sunil Kumar).
The reviews reflect the disciplinary and thematic diversity in the field of gender. Feminist practioners of particular disciplines are taking up the challenge of disrupting the disciplinary registers from within. These studies push the existing boundaries either by making new interpretations or by questioning the fundamental assumptions of the discipline itself (see the review by Anup Dhar). Feminist scholarship also attempts to be informed by epistemological shifts, and thus in unrelenting conversation so as to remain relevant, critical and vibrant (see the review by Krishna Menon). Such tenuous relationship from within and without the conventional disciplines, and the adoption of interdisciplinary approaches to specific problematic, is indispensible for feminist scholarship as pointed out by Gita Chadha also in her review. Several reviewers in this volume (like Anjali Arondekar, Nitya Vasudevan, Trina Nileena Banerjee, Mangai) have incisively reflected if the book under review has passed this litmus test, along with suggesting the conceptual and/or methodological limitations that the authors could consider, thereby keeping the conversation alive.
Law, marriage, and family have been the conventional areas of feminist scholarship. The books on these subjects, reviewed by Anuja Agrawal, Pratiksha Baxi, Shefali Jha and Usha Mudiganti, are telling about how relevant some of the older problems continue to be and what the newer sites and methodologies are for studying these complex institutions and the operation of gendered modes of power. Scholars working on the issues of labour are making interesting connections with land and ecological transformations, and bringing forth women’s resistance to the exploitative modes of production (reviewed by Manisha Rao, Sumit Saurabh Srivastava). However, as pointed out by Sagari R. Ramdas in her review, a more critical and nuanced exploration of land, labour, knowledge and resistance using gender as an analytical category is called for. One of the areas that continue to be highly contested in feminist scholarship is the question of sexual labour as reflected in the reviews by Baran Farooqi and Reshma Bharadwaj. Reviews by Smriti Nevatia and Veena Gowda discuss the processes, challenges and contradictions of feminist activism and interventions. Newer concerns related to health like the assisted reproductive technologies are explored (reviewed by P. Bindhulakshmi), and important inroads are made into hitherto uncharted areas like mental health and women as patrons of art and architecture (see reviews by Namita Ranganathan and Semeen Ali respectively). Yet, I craved to see books in the areas of sports, geography, trade and commerce, war and diplomacy analysed through the lens of gender.
A compelling reflection, in the process of editing the reviews, was that the subject of feminist scholarship and politics has emerged as one of the most contentious questions creating a robust milieu for contemporary intellectual and political engagements. The women’s movement(s) and studies of gender were forced to rethink its foundational principles of theorizing social relations. Significantly, the unified category of ‘woman’ was questioned for its homogeneity and necessitated an analysis of one or more intersecting axes of difference (see reviews by Deepa Sreenivas, Neha Chatterji, Kamal Nayan Chaubey, Amir Ali, L.N. Venkataraman). In the most welcome move, there is a growing body of research exploring gender relations in conjunction with a vision for social and political equality that includes class, caste, religion, disability and sexuality. However, the switch from the category of ‘woman’ to ‘gender’ is still treated with scepticism in many circles of Women’s Studies (including my own training in the discipline), as the latter is considered to empty the social import of hierarchical division between men and women and neutralize the sexual difference. Having acknowledged that women and men are internally differentiated and that gender intersects, in complex and contradictory ways, with other categories of inequality, it is believed that there is (still) no reason to give up the category of woman for feminist struggles. This position, however, gets complicated with the provocative question of ‘cis-women’s vulnerability’ as raised by Asha Achuthan in her categorization of ‘pre-transfeminism’.
One of the dilemmas I would like to foreground is the additive quality of various categories in feminist scholarship. With ‘intersectionality’ becoming the buzz word in the last decade, and rightly so with several critiques mounted against the homogenizing category of ‘woman’ and the limited analytical scope of the concept of ‘difference’, it has mostly produced a magic mantra of various inter-related vectors of difference without necessarily engaging with a few categories and their underlying structural relations, which might fundamentally alter feminist theorization and politics. For instance, it is a missed opportunity to reflect on this question in the reviews by Chitra Narayanan and Firdous Azmat Siddiqui, who are calling for further inclusion of working class or Muslim women in their respective analysis without questioning the gendered regimes of (corporate) organizations that are peppered with the liberal discourse of formal equality or the gendered discourse of nationalism itself. This concern is placed here to refrain from employing these categories as merely descriptive or additive; and to reiterate the basic question: who is/are the ethico-political subject(s) of contemporary feminist politics?
This project of commissioning and editing the book reviews has been a learning experience and I thank Professor Kumkum Roy for giving me this opening and introducing me to the Editors of The Book Review, and Chandra Chari, Uma Iyengar and Adnan Farooqui for hand-holding me through the entire process. Much love and thanks to Roshni Chattopadhyay for selecting the painting for the cover page.
GEETA THATRA