Articles by Maithreyi Krishnaraj

Ethics for Our Times: Essays in Gandhian Perspective by M V Nadkarni (New Delhi: OUP), 2011; pp 262, Rs 650.

An introduction to this collection of papers on women and water.

In the article, “Epidemiological Transition in Urban Maharashtra” by Anjali Radkar, Tara Kanitkar and Madhushree Talwalkar (25 September), Table 1 gives the crude birth rate, crude death rate and the infant mortality rate.

Feminism has not resolved the issue of the female body; is it all constructed by sociocultural practices and ideology, or, is there a female body prior to this construction? Is it all just a "neuter" body, where femaleness is all what society has constructed, or, is there a female body which is a given, biologically? Insofar as feminism has tried to engage with sex and gender, by trying to move away from a biological essentialism, and in trying to focus on differences between women by caste, class and ethnicity, it deflected attention away from the female body itself. The feminist viewpoint thereby became unable to speak of the body as a subject.

In what way does gender mute the acquisition of citizenship? The papers in this edition of the Review of Women's Studies deal with issues of gender and political power: the power for women to live and have rights as a free citizen; the power and opportunity to participate in the public realm by loosening the fetters of tradition that bind them in the private domain. The articles also bring into focus the fact that groups of women cannot claim citizenship rights as free individuals exercising autonomy and choice in their exercise of sexuality or enter the public space, and if they do so it is within the bounds of family or as rendering service as subjects of a constructed Hindu nation.