1,721,051 research outputs found
The Gendered Apparatus of the Military: A Study of the Army Officer’s Wife in India
Full text linkMilitary wives have recently become the subject of research with an increasing focus on the role of their labour in upholding and reproducing processes of militarisation. This thesis examines the centrality of Indian Army officers’ wives and explores how their gendered labour is upheld while they also hold the potential to critique the durability and ubiquity of military and patriarchal power.Based on over 80 interviews with women married to officers of the Indian Army conducted over seven months of fieldwork, this thesis contends that officers’ wives are not apolitical or irrelevant to the gender order or military apparatus. They consciously engage with and perceive their distinct relationship with the military apparatus and the broader socio-cultural milieu as expressions of their agency (choices). They stress their capacity to control their labour and distinguish themselves from other women in the larger military and civil order in multiple subjective ways
Globalisation, neoliberalism and the transformation of higher education in Punjab, India
Full text linkNeoliberalism, social reproduction, and the governmentality of population policies in India
No full textFeminism in Literary Dialogue: A Study of two revolutionary women’s memoirs
Full text linkWomen’s writing whether studied as a pedagogical initiative within the broader inter-disciplinary field of Gender Studies or as a part of the tradition of literary criticism in India; plays an imperative role in theorising Indian feminism.The main aim of this dissertation is to recognize the multi-faceted nature of Indian feminism, and to bridge the gap between academic engagements with feminism and the lives and reflections of activists through their writing. By focusing on the memoirs of revolutionary/communist women, Ajitha and Kondapalli Koteswaramma, I have attempted to highlight the memoir as a form of life-writing within the genre of autobiographies, which expand the concept of ‘feminist archive’ in India. Ajitha’s memoir Kerala’s Naxalbari Ajitha; Memoirs of a young revolutionary and Kondapalli Koteswaramma’s The Sharp Knife of Memory represent the act of self-representation through memoir form.This dissertation analyses each in their own right and then engages the writers in a dialogue that figuratively charts out, contrasts and comparisons, between two voices in terms epistemic positioning, the worldview, political spaces imagined, constructed, and written in the course of their individualist narrative.Using the phenomenological tool of ‘lived experience’ this dissertation attempts to understand their views and understandings of how they were positioned within broader social and political movement and this positioning contributed to the processes and evolution of their respective (feminist) consciousness as revolutionary wome
Gendering (In)security in Contemporary States of Exception [Special issue of: Third World Thematic. Vol. 3 No. 2]
No full textThis collection contributes to debates, which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. However, rather than focusing on the terms of the debate, it foregrounds the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, paying particular attention to the ‘state of exception’ and similar frameworks. In doing so, contributors to this collection trouble the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neo-colonial contexts, it provides an approach, which allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analyses of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation
Gendering Security and Insecurity: Post/Neocolonial Security Logics and Feminist Interventions
No full textSecurity studies and international relations have conventionally relegated gendered analysis to the margins of academic concern, most commonly through the ‘women in’ or ‘women and’ politics and IR discourse. This comprehensive volume contributes to debates which seek to move feminist scholarship away from the reification of the war/peace and security/economy divides. By foregrounding the empirical reality of the breakdown of these traditional divisions, the authors pay particular attention to frameworks which query their very existence. In doing so, the collection as a whole troubles the ubiquitous concept and practices of ‘(in)security’ and their effects on differentially positioned subjects. By gendering (in)securities in ‘states of exception’ and other paradigms of government related to it, especially in postcolonial and neocolonial contexts, the book provides an approach that allows us to study the complex and interrelated security logics, which constitute the messy realities of different – and particularly vulnerable – subjects’ lives. In other words, it suggests that these frameworks are ripe for feminist interventions and analysis of the logics and production of (in)securities as well as of resistance and hybridisation.
This book was originally published as an online special issue of the journal Third World Thematics
Sikh/Muslim Bhai-Bhai? Towards a social history of the rabābī tradition of shabad kīrtan
No full textThis article situates the rabābī tradition of kīrtan within the backdrop of politicized religious boundaries, which find it increasingly difficult to locate the Muslim presence within Sikh history and sacred music. The musical recitation of Sikh sacred hymns through shabad kīrtan has its origins in the appointment by Gurū Nanak of his companion Bhai Mardana in the fifteenth century. This story of origins, while being an integral part of how shabad kīrtan is reflected upon, has not been adequately explored for its significance in terms of social relations, not least for what are now seen as oppositional locations of Sikh and Muslim. The article explores how a social history of the rabābī tradition within context raises a number of questions about how we conceptualize shabad kīrtan within wider currents of identity, religious boundary-making, professional association and spiritual music. © 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC
More Than Just Lines: Bordering Citizenship in Contemporary Assam
No full textThis thesis is a qualitative study that explores borders and bordering practices which have constructed, shaped and continue to reshape the contemporary Indian state of Assam. Using mixed methods including community-based research, the thesis critically examines Assam as a site of bordered citizenship girded by a bordering apparatus with historical antecedents which continue to shape Assam’s present. Drawing on an extensive body of literature which problematises traditional ideas of borders as being purely physical and/or geo-spatial, this thesis argues that conceptualisations of borders and border practices construct Assam as a place of shifting spatial imaginaries, while simultaneously shaping and reshaping it within bounded, bordered logics and technologies of control. Assam reflects multiple shifts in the socio-economic and political demographics of the region. The empirical work of this project builds towards a reconceptualisation of Assam as a space of bordering with multiple layers, including but not limited to the colonial plantation complex, and the legacy of commodity production - namely rice and tea - in the region, labour and migration patterns. A topographical landscape of rivers and valleys shape economic and social practices, and the geopolitical territorial maintenance and surveillance of boundaries surrounding and encompassing Assam over time. As this thesis argues, Assam has been an experimental site of bordering practices, more recently exerted through bounded notions of citizenship, manifested by the implementation of the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. Over time, the Indian state has pushed Assam to the front and centre as well as the peripheries in its experimentation with documentary citizenship. Through an analysis of data collected for this project, the thesis highlights the intersecting nature of class, caste, gender, religion and language dynamics, all of which have variously contributed to the shifts and transformations in bordering practices, and the resultant violence arising therefrom. Finally, the thesis also illustrates individual and community acts of subversion and transgression, which I analyse as acts of ongoing resistant responses. Understanding these dynamics contributes to our understanding of bordering as action and response, at multiple levels and microsites in Assam
“Mulgi shikali, pragati zali”? Reimagining education, development, and progress with rural girls in India
Full text linkThis thesis critically explores the significance of education in the lives of rural and Adivasi girls in India, situating it within a conceptualisation of education as a double-edged “weapon”. Examining how gender, development, and education orthodoxies collude in the development project of educating marginalised girls in India, my research interrogates assumptions about the “promise” of education to bring about social and economic progress, and instead highlights the ways in which girls’ education is instrumentalised or even weaponised towards the reproduction and maintenance of agendas such as neoliberalism and neocolonialism. Further, through participatory methodologies that centre the voices and experiences of rural and Adivasi girls from the Nashik district of Maharashtra, India, my research considers the structural factors mediating girls’ access to education, the particular subjectivities produced within girls’ educational encounters, and the ways in which girls negotiate, resist, or reimagine these subjectivities to interrupt dominant narratives of education as an unquestioned vehicle towards progress. In doing this, I recast education as simultaneously a weapon of destruction and restructuring linked to historical and ongoing forms of colonisation, as well as a weapon of “de-construction”, enabling us to become aware of as well as deconstruct the structural webs enmeshing us. Centring the voices of marginalised girls who are silenced within development scholarship and policy discourse, my research contributes to critical and feminist epistemologies that push the boundaries of knowledge production. Through this epistemic engagement with girls, the thesis develops “dhadpad” – a Marathi term denoting struggle – as a theoretical lens which disavows the agent/victim binary and makes visible the ongoing negotiations, covert resistances, and collective forms of struggle of rural girls within and against structural limits. Situating this dhadpad in education and other pedagogic processes, this thesis highlights their potential to radically expand dhadpad as well as collectivise it towards shared liberatory goals
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