Womens and Gender Studies in India: Crossings [Paperback]

This book frames the major debates and contemporary issues in womens and gender studies in India. It locates them in the context of key theories, their interlinkages, and significant crossings and overlaps within the field while juxtaposing feminist and queer perspectives.

The essays in the volume foreground emerging challenges as well as offer clues to future trajectories for womens and gender studies in the country through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary survey of intersectionalities in feminist activism and theory; gender, caste and class; feminist, masculinity, queer and transgender studies; disability and feminism; feminist and queer pedagogies; and Indian, Western and transnational feminisms. The volume traces how gender studies have shaped established social science as well as interpretative and representational discourses (psychoanalysis, literature, aesthetics, cinema, new media studies and folklore). It examines their strategic potential to draw upon and transform these areas in national and international contexts.

This book will be useful to students, teachers and researchers in womens studies, gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies and South Asian studies.

List of figures. List of tables. Contributors. Acknowledgements.
Introduction: womens and gender Studies at the crossroads.

Part I Stirrings, across time and place
1. (How) to be or not to be: womens and gender studies in India today. 2. Feminist crossings in time and space: the question of culture. 3. Dynamics of the womens movement and womens studies in India: an evolutionary perspective. 4. Intersections of gender, caste and class: agenda building in the Indian womens Movemel³!