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Review of Women's Studies

The Use and Abuse of Democracy in West Bengal

Vol - XLII No. 44, November 03, 2007 | Sanjeeb Mukherjee

This article examines the left's engagement with democracy in West Bengal. Before 1967, the left built a deliberative democratic tradition in Bengal. The United Front governments and the Naxalite movement led to a radicalisation of politics, which was followed by a fratricidal conflict culminating in a counter attack on the entire left by the state. This defeat paved the way for a historic compromise of the parliamentary left. In 1977 this defeated left came to power, but it was a veritable political revolution as a middle class-led intermediate regime came to acquire social and political power. The central claim to legitimacy of this new regime was its contention of representing the people. Hence, disciplining them as well as securing their consent through the organisation and ideology of the communist party is central to their continuation in power. This new ruling class lives off the social surplus creating a fiscal crisis for the state. To get out of this crisis it ultimately has to surrender to capital, shift to a neoliberal growth model and increasingly attack democracy.

The Nexus of Gender Discrimination with Malnutrition: An Introduction

Vol - XLII No. 44, November 03, 2007 | Kavita Sethuraman and Nata Duvvury

There is a complex relationship between gender discrimination and malnutrition, mediated by women's empowerment and social status, that needs to be more fully understood in south Asia, a region where progress in raising the nutrition levels has slowed in recent years. The collection of papers in this special issue is based on studies in three sites in India and Bangladesh that sought to find ways in which the health and nutrition status of girls and women could be improved.

Care and Support of Unmarried Adolescent Girls in Rajasthan

Vol - XLII No. 44, November 03, 2007 | Alka Barua, Hemant Apte, and Pradeep Kumar

Adolescent girls have considerable unmet needs in health, reproductive health, and nutrition. A survey in Rajasthan sought to ascertain the extent to which unmarried adolescent girls receive care and support from their parents. Study findings suggest that a majority of them received a high or medium level of care. There was no clear pattern by socio-economic status. In a context where gender discrimination is rife, some families, regardless of their economic circumstances, do seem to provide nutrition, health, and psychosocial care for their adolescent daughters.

Dangerous Liaisons

Vol - XLII No. 17, April 28, 2007 | Shilpa Phadke

Safety in public spaces has thus far been tied to the notion of state responsibility and client-hood. For women particularly, this status of client-hood is linked intimately with ideologies of protectionism and the need to demonstrate protection-worthiness through manufacturing respectability. This reduces rather than enhances women's access to public space. This paper interrogates the discourse of safety in public space to argue that making a claim to the right to take risks in public space rather than petitioning for safety might take women further in the struggle to access public space as citizens. Focusing on Mumbai's growing hierarchies of access to public space, the paper also argues that women's exclusion from public space is linked to the exclusion of other marginal citizens.

The Way She Moves

Vol - XLII No. 17, April 28, 2007 | Shilpa Ranade

This paper examines the everyday practice of gendered public space through an analysis of three "mapping" studies conducted in Mumbai. The first study attempted to document and represent public spaces onto drawings through observation. The second study was based on a participatory research methodology and came about through two simple exercises developed for pedagogic activities. These studies, conducted under the Gender and Space project at Pukar, focused on how male and female bodies locate themselves in and move through public space in their everyday negotiation of space, in the process participating in the production and reproduction of a hegemonic gender-space.

Negotiating the Mohalla

Vol - XLII No. 17, April 28, 2007 | Sameera Khan

Restrictions imposed on Muslim women by their own community are closely linked to the exclusion of the Muslim community as a whole. As a group Muslims are being increasingly marginalised from the mainstream political, social and cultural fabric of Mumbai and from access to mixed housing. While homogeneous community-dominated neighbourhoods create the perception of greater safety for the community, they also increase the policing of women. This in turn has a strong impact on Muslim women's capacity to engage risk in public spaces.

The Dashing Ladies of the Shiv Sena

Vol - XLII No. 17, April 28, 2007 | Tarini Bedi

Members of the Shiv Sena's women's wing have adopted a skilful negotiation of the public sphere through everyday "visible" performative strategies that get expressed at the local level in urban India. The politics of visibility is critical in the constitution of the political, gendered subject within a political party, where women despite their broad participation, remain structurally subordinate. Narratives and data from fieldwork in this article show how personal stories of political awakening are deeply embedded in the visual performances and urban imaginaries that frame them.

'Shall We Go Out?'

Vol - XLII No. 17, April 28, 2007 | Kalpana Viswanath and Surabhi Tandon Mehrotra

A city needs to be imagined as a space occupied by diverse sets of people with diverse needs and aspirations. The quality of a city has to be judged by what it offers to its residents - the right to live, move around and work with dignity and safety. Delhi falls short on delivering this to many of its residents, especially the more vulnerable and marginalised populations. We address this issue from the perspective of women's access and right to public spaces. For many women and men, the anonymity of a city's public spaces offers the space and freedom to escape the hold of the family or the traditional community. But for women, this freedom is severely hampered by the high rates of violence against women that have come to define Delhi. In order to understand the gendered nature of access to public spaces and its effect on women's mobility, Jagori conducted over 30 "safety audits" around the city. These audits, along with the findings from a survey of 500 women across the city and several group discussions, provide the data which this paper uses to explore the ways in which public spaces are viewed and accessed differently by men and women.

Is 'Gender' Easy to Study?

Vol - XLI No. 42, October 21, 2006 | Maithreyi Krishnaraj

Even if women's studies centres concentrated more on academic work rather than the action programmes imposed on them by the University Grants Commission, would they be equipped to do so? Most women's studies practitioners skirt the tricky issues of methodology and concept and march ahead bravely, meticulously documenting "women's oppression". The tragedy is that this empiricism does not equip us in developing our own theoretical foundations. If we want women's studies to be an interdisciplinary enterprise, we will have to see if it can be integrated as a specific epistemology to rebuild the existing structure of knowledge by creating new organising concepts, methodologies, skills and reciprocal assimilation of various disciplines.

Making It Relevant

Vol - XLI No. 42, October 21, 2006 | Anandhi S and Padmini Swaminathan

What is women's studies? Is it a discipline? A subject? What should a women's studies programme connote and what obtains in practice? Through a survey, this paper attempts to map the different aspects of the women's studies programme in institutions of higher education of Tamil Nadu. The contention of the paper is that the forms and conditions of the institutionalisation of women's studies in places of higher education to a large extent constrained the possibilities of carrying out research in this area as an academic discipline. The paper has important implications for bodies such as the University Grants Commission that, at one level, have been in the forefront of the institutionalisation of the women's studies movement in India, particularly in the 1990s, but, at another level, have failed to achieve the kinds of intellectual and political changes promised by the founders of this discipline in India.