Women S Studies In India

Women&Rsquo;S Studies First Emerged In India During The 1970S As A Forceful Critique Of Those Processes That Had Made Women Invisible&Nbsp;After Independence&Mdash;Invisible Not Only To Society And The State, But Also To Higher Education And Its Disciplines.&Nbsp;Since That Beginning, So Much Has Happened In This Already Vast Field That It Would Be Hard To Find A Major Issue Or Subject That Has Not Been Addressed By Scholars And Activists.&Nbsp; This Comprehensive Reader Sets Out To Provide A Map Of The Development Of Women&Rsquo;S Studies And The Ever Expanding Terrain That It Has Been Investigating.&Nbsp;The Introduction Explores The Growth Of The Field From The Upheavals Of The 1970S To The Transformed Conjunctures Of The 1990S. In The Process, The Often Elusive Relationships Between Women&Rsquo;S Studies, The Women&Rsquo;S Movement And The Structures Of Higher Education Are Highlighted.&Nbsp;Over Eighty Edited Essays Have Been Brought Together In This Single Volume Under Distinct Thematic Clusters&Mdash;From The New Beginnings Of The 1970S To Politics, History, Development, Violence, The Law, Education, Health, Family And Household, Caste And Tribe, Religion And Communalism, Sexualities, And Literature And The Media.&Nbsp;This Reader Is For Both Newcomers To Women&Rsquo;S Studies And For Those Who Have Long Been Part Of It.&Nbsp;

This book frames the major debates and contemporary issues in women's and gender studies in India. It locates them in the context of key theories, their interlinkages, and significant crossings and overlaps within the field while juxtaposing feminist and queer perspectives. The essays in the volume foreground emerging challenges as well as offer clues to future trajectories for women's and gender studies in the country through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary survey of intersectionality in feminist activism and theory; gender, caste and class; feminist, masculinity, queer and transgender studies; femininity and masculinity; disability and feminism; feminist and queer pedagogies; and Indian, Western and transnational feminisms. The volume traces how gender studies have shaped established social science as well as interpretative and representational discourses (psychoanalysis, literature, cinema, new media studies and folklore). It examines their strategic potential to transform these areas and explore international contexts. This book will be useful to students, teachers and researchers in women's studies, gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies and South Asian studies. potential to transform these areas and explore international contexts. This book will be useful to students, teachers and researchers in women's studies, gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies and South Asian studies.

Contributed articles on womens' studies in India and their representation in Indic literature on completion of 25 years of the Women's Studies & Development Centre, University of Delhi.

Lectures delivered at a Winter Institute, organized by the Research Centre for Women's Studies, S.N.D.T. Women's University, for the preparation of curriculum and teacher training in women's studies.

Since the mid-1980s, the presence of women in governance has become a major marker of successful democracy in global and national discourses on the democratization of society. A diverse set of nation-states have legislatively mandated gender quotas to ensure the presence of elected women representatives (EWRs) in various rungs of governance. Since 1993, the Indian state has legislated a massive program of democratization and decentralization. As a result, more than 1.5 million EWRs have taken office within the lower rungs of governance or the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI). This book is an ethnography of the Indian state and its policy of legislated entry of women into political life. It argues that political participation of women is necessary to change the political practices in society, to make institutions more gender, class and caste representative, and to empower individual women to negotiate both formal and informal institutions. Its locus is the everyday life contexts of EWRs in the southern Indian state of Karnataka who negotiate their own meanings of politics, state, society, empowerment and political subjectivity. Analysing three factors – structural boundaries, sociocultural divisions and conjunctural limitations imposed on the participation of EWRs by political parties – the book demonstrates that the social embeddedness of PRIs within everyday practices and social relations of identity and power severely constrain and shape the political participation and empowerment of EWRs. Providing a valuable insight into contemporary state and feminist praxis in India, this book will be of interest to scholars of grass-roots democracy, gender studies and Asian politics.

This book focuses on women’s human rights in India. Drawing on case studies, it provides a clear overview of the key sources on gender and rights in the country. Further, it contextualizes women’s rights at the critical intersection of caste, religion and class, and analyses barriers to the realization of women’s human rights in practice. It also develops strategies for moving forward towards greater recognition, protection, promotion and fulfilment of women’s human rights in India. Drawing on critical pedagogical tools to analyse groundbreaking court cases, this book will be a key text in human rights studies. It will be indispensable to students, scholars and researchers of gender studies, sociology, law and human rights.