1st Edition
Contemporary Gender Formations in India In-between Conformity, Dissent and Affect
The volume discusses critical issues surrounding the developments in gender movements in the last two decades in India following the Delhi rape case and the ensuing massive protests in December 2012. A critical documentation of some of the key moments surrounding the contemporary gendered formations and radicalisms in South Asia, the chapters span questions of class, caste, sexuality, digital feminisms, and conflict zones.
The book looks at anger, protest, and imaginations of resistance. It showcases the ‘new’ visibility that digital spaces have opened up to lend voice to survivors who are let down by traditional justice mechanisms and raises questions regarding ‘individualized’ modes of seeking justice as against traditional ‘collective’ voices that have always been a hallmark of movements. The volume analyses and criticizes the complicity of the state and the court as agents of reinforcing gender violence – an issue that has not been theorized enough by activists and scholars of violence. Further, it also delves into the #MeToo movement and the LoSHA, as both have raised contentious, controversial, and often conflicting debates on the nature of addressing sexual harassment, particularly at the workplace.
Calling for further debate and discussions of cyberspace, gender justice, sexual violence, male entitlement, and forms of neoliberal feminism, this volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers in the areas of women and gender studies, sociology and social theory, gender politics, political theory, democracy, protest movements, politics, media and the internet, political advocacy, and law and legal theory. It will also be a compelling read for anyone interested in gender justice and equal rights.
Moving the Spatial Fulcrums of the Gendered Mobilizations of Our Times: Beyond #MeToo and LOSHA: An Introduction
NANDINI DHAR
Part One: The Complicated Imaginaries of Sexual Violence: Gendered Bodies, Public Spaces and the Affective Registers
1. I am As Big As the City I Walk: Documenting Maya Rao’s The Walk
ANANNYA DASGUPTA
2. “Ain’t We Women?” The Media Amnesia on Women’s Voices in the Northeast
ANINDITA SENGUPTA
3. The State and its Hyper-Masculinity Practices in India’s “Northeast” : Articulations of Resistance in Contemporary Literary Writings from the “Northeast”
BHUMIKA RAJAN
4. Is There A Desire In the Classroom?
RAHUL SEN
Part Two: Beyond the Specters of Sexual Violence: Gendered Bodies, Agency and Resistance
5. Whose Blood Is It Anyway? Locating Menstruation, Locating Women’s Rights: Tracing the “New” Indian Feminist Subjectivity in Contemporary Times
JIGISHA BHATTACHARYA
6. Margins of Least Happiness: Understanding the Marginalized Women in Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
RATIKA KAUSHIK
7. The Public Sphere and the Contemporary Women’s Sociability Practices: A Study of the Bengali Adda
RITAM DUTTA
8. The Traffic in Bangalore: Thoughts on Sexuality, Class and Transport
LARS OLAV AABERG
9. Production of Neoliberal Subjectivity (ies) on the Shop-Floor: A Study of Women Shop-Floor Employees in a Shopping Mall
IPSITA PRADHAN
10. Gendering the Working-Class Subject: Notes on Few Contemporary Struggles
ARYA THOMAS
Part Three: Realms of Corporeality, Collectivity and Resistance: Bringing It Back to Sexual Violence, Hashtag Movements and their Everyday Ramifications
11. Will the Revolution be Tweeted: New Femininities in Indian Digital Sphere
SHWETA KHILNANI
12. Indian Cyberfeminism: Digital Liberation or Selective Outrage?
DEBANJANA NAYEK
13. It Wasn’t Really Really A Rape! Exploring Sexuality in a New Age Campus
SAMEENA DALWAI and EYSHA MARYSHA
14. The Evidence of Rape: Legitimacy of Legitimate Processes
TARISHI VARMA and RADHIKA GAJJALA
Biography
Nandini Dhar is Associate Professor of Literary and Gender Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University at Sonipat, India. As a scholar, she is primarily concerned with the writing of neoliberal subjectivities in Global Anglophone late twentieth- and twenty-first-century literatures. Her essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, The Comparatist, A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, and several other edited anthologies. Nandini is also a poet and is the author of the full-length collection, Historians of Redundant Moments: A Novel in Verse (2016).
