Articles by Lata Mani

This article reflects on the idea of the city shared alike by feminism and neo-liberalism and its regrettable implications for how the question of women's sexual freedom is articulated and defended. It argues that feminist discourse is in need of being rethought and proposes that such rethinking will require taking critical distance from the neo-liberal paradigm and its notion of freedom, as also broadening the scope of feminism to address existential issues facing young women and men today.

Does suffering affect dignity? This essay examines the consequences of construing dignity not as an intrinsic, constitutive quality integral to our very being but as an extrinsic, variable property dependent on certain conditions. It investigates the centrality of suffering to a left-of-centre imagining of solidarity politics and proposes that this Judeo- Christian legacy also contributes to an asymmetrical relationship between an activist-witness and suffering humanity.

This article argues that globalisation requires an unanchored discourse of globality to mediate its disruptive effects. This phantom discourse does not merely disarticulate the real relations between neoliberal globalisation and the material realities it enters, transforms, or destroys. It also offers a mode of affiliation for its chief beneficiaries who are required to feel global in conditions that are a far cry from what that term supposedly denotes. What are some of the cultural factors that facilitate such a discourse being credible? What can we learn from some of the terms that have come into prominence in this context? The article is also concerned with the contradictions and tensions that mark the contemporary moment. It argues that hyperbole is not merely a feature of present discourse but also a symptom of what ails it.