South Asian Feminisms

This collection intervenes in key areas of feminist scholarship and activism in contemporary South Asia, particularly India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, while asking how this investigation might enrich feminist theorizing and practice globally.

South Asian feminism is in crisis. Under constant attack from right-wing nationalism and religious fundamentalism and co-opted by 'NGO-ization' and neoliberal state agendas, once autonomous and radical forms of feminist mobilization have been ideologically fragmented and replaced. It is time to rethink the feminist political agenda for the predicaments of the present. This timely volume provides an original and unprecedented exploration of the current state of South Asian feminist politics. It will map the new sites and expressions of feminism in the region today, addressing issues like disability, Internet technologies, queer subjectivities and violence as everyday life across national boundaries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Written by young scholars from the region, this book addresses the generational divide of feminism in the region, effectively introducing a new 'wave' of South Asian feminists that resonates with feminist debates everywhere around the globe.

Fascinating articles on a range of issues relating to South Asia, feminisms and women. The contributions interrogate the political, and elucidate women's participation in politics exploring the impact of religion on women's lives and the use of religion and tradition. It investigates the political intersections of feminism, ethics and violence.

Transnational feminism has been critical to feminist theorizing in the global North over the last few decades. Perhaps due to its broad terminology, transnational feminism can become vague and dislocated, losing its ability to name specific critiques of and responses to empire, race, and globalization that are emboldened by its transnational remit. This volume encompasses an expansive engagement and exploration of transnational South Asian feminist movements, networks, and critiques within the context of the popular and the diaspora in South Asia. The contributing authors address key issues in a global context, especially as they operate both in a situated and the diasporic imaginary of South Asia. While the idea of the popular in South Asia has often been circumscribed by the spaces and cultural politics of Bollywood, this interdisciplinary volume takes an innovative turn to examine how academics, advocates, activists, and artists envision the inroads and consequences of nationalism, globalization and/or empire, which continually remake communities and alter needs and allegiances. Through ethnography, literature, dance, cinema, activism, poetry, and storytelling, the authorsd analyse popular and social justice using a focused, multidisciplinary gendered lens. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Anuloja and the Valkai groupFeminist activism as 'active living'; Ties through loss; Notes; References; 8 Feminism in the shadow of multi-faithism: implications for South Asian women in the UK; Introduction; Whither feminism: secular and co-opted or pious and fractured?; British public policy and religious claims; Local consequences for women and women's organizations; Undermining feminist projects; The SBS study; Conclusion; Notes; References; About the contributors; Index.

This book is a study of the resurgence and re-imagination of feminist discourse on gender and sexuality in South Asia as told through its cinematic, literary, and social media narratives. It brings incisive and expert analyses of emerging disruptive articulations that represent an unprecedented surge of feminist response to the culture of sexual violence in South Asia. Here scholars across disciplines and international borders chronicle the expressions of a disruptive feminist solidarity in contemporary South Asia. They offer critical investigations of these newly complicated discourses across narrative forms – hashtag activism on Facebook and Twitter, the writings of diasporic writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Bollywood films like Mardaani, feminist Dalit narratives in the fiction of Bama Faustina, social media activism against rape culture, journalistic and cinematic articulations on queer rights, state censorship of "India’s Daughter", and feminist film activism in Bangladesh, Kashmir, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.

Women as Subjects affords a rare opportunity to consider the changing identity and status of women in India today- how they view themselves and how they are viewed- through the current work of seven scholars- anthropologists, historians, and sociologists from India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These essays combined with Nita Kumar's substantial theoretical introduction, illustrate the overall problem of women's subjectivity extraordinarily well and serve to question, modify, and adapt Western-based feminist theory and Eurocentric postmodern theory, building a bridge both to non-South Asian feminist work and to nonfeminist South Asian work.

The book offers one of the first detailed studies of South Asian women, it provides new empirical data on the issues apparent in South Asian women's lives by 'giving voice' to a group of women who would otherwise remain silent. It is based upon an ethnographic study of a small South Asian community in an inner city. The book offers a new and compelling account of South Asian women, as well as focussing on the ways in which gender and 'race' interact in women’s lives. The book offers an important theoretical contribution to the area of feminist theory. The concept of patriarchy is contested and reworked and applied to the study of South Asian women and their cultural experiences. In this sense, practices such as arranged marriages, dowries, domestic labour and domestic finance are analyzed as different influences of patriarchy inside the household, as well as education and the labour market as influences of patriarchy outside the household.