Mary E. John

The Problem of Women’s Labour: Some Autobiographical Perspectives

This article is concerned with a long-standing problem concerning the nature and value of women’s labour in modern India. The first part of the article offers a theoretical overview of the issues involved, arguing for an intersectional framework that would reorient a focus on women through questions of gender, class, caste and sexuality. Issues relating to the prominence of the domestic sphere, stigma and public labour, and the abjection of sex work are brought into this frame. The second part of the article uses the method of exploring women’s life narratives or autobiographies to investigate this problem through the places occupied by labour in a life story, drawing on the writings of Rashsundari Debi, Binodini Dasi, Baby Kamble, Baby Haldar and Nalini Jameela. The third part of the article reflects on the insights gleaned, in particular on the kinds of conflicts that structure women’s relationships in the world of labour and on the further questions this raises for feminist analysis.

WOMEN AND FEMINISMS IN CONTEMPORARY ASIA

If any continent has emerged as a power to reckon with in recent times, it is Asia. The ‘rise of Asia’ evokes not just the economic ferment of accelerated production, trade and financial flows, and the extraordinary movement of peoples, but a pervasive cultural sensibility, a potent source of meaning and structure of feeling. ‘Asia’ has also fundamentally restructured over-used and often careless references to globalization. Feminists have been leaders in drubbing claims that nations (in general) are giving way to a (single) borderless global world, pointing instead to the deepening of inequalities across and within them. Less noticed, however, are the signs of new patterns of regionalization, with ‘Asia’ a prime representative. Asia today is, therefore, something more than an arbitrary collection of territorially contiguous nations on the world map. Different nation-states in the region are both more globally integrated and more interdependent than ever before. This is why the major financial crisis a decade ago was called ‘Asian’ not global, and certainly not Western. This is also why, especially since the 1970s, migration to the West no longer dominates the picture; instead we are witnessing broad patterns of migration within Asia (Gulati 2006). Many

Democracy, Patriarchies and Reservations for Women A Note

Article 243D and 243T inserted by the Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992 and the Constitution (Seventy-fourth Amendment) Act, 1992 respectively provide that not less than one-third of the seats shall be reserved for women in every panchayat and every Muniâpality. Further, the said articles provide that, from amongst the seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes not less than one-third seats shall be reserved for women belonging to the Scheduled Castes or, as the case may be, the Scheduled Tribes. The said articles also provide that such seats reserved for women may be allotted by. rotation to different constituencies. 2. Having provided reservation for women in Panchayats and Municipalities, it is now proposed to provide reservation for women on the same lines in the House of the People and in the Legislative Assemblies of the States by amending the Constitution. The major political parties are in favour of making such reservation for women. 3. The Bill seeks to achieve the aforesaid object.

Gender and Higher Education in the Time of Reforms

The current moment of higher education reforms in India has yet to receive sustained attention from scholars and activists. Historically speaking, women’s education occupied a central place from the nineteenth century to the first decades of India’s independence, but, curiously, lost prominence with the onset of the women’s movement and the introduction of women’s studies in the academy in the 1980s and since then. Although the participation of women in higher education shows steady improvement and a narrowing of the gender gap, the article examines national-level data to reveal the complex and elusive forms being currently assumed by gender discrimination. This includes recognising that disparities among women from different social groups are greater than those among men of the same groups. Secondly, many of the contexts where gender gaps have closed are also characterised by adverse child sex ratios due to practices of sex selection. Taken together, the current era of expansion in higher education demands analysis from a gendered perspective.

Introduction to a Round-Table Discussion

Mary E. John is Associate Professor, Women’s Studies Programme, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110 067. E-mail: mas01@vsnl.net. In February 2001 the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, organised a seminar under the title’Engendering Disciplines/Disciplining Gender? Towards a History of Women’s Studies in India’ as part of its 20th anniversary celebrations. A major compulsion behind the seminar was the strong sense that, in comparison to the women’s movement, women’s studies suffered from a severe lack of clarity. In many ways this is surely ironic. After all, one would imagine that, precisely by virtue of its academic orientation and the standard products of women’s studiesnamely, articles and books-a much firmer grasp of the history and nature of women’s studies would be available, especially when compared to the considerably more inchoate and diffuse forms of a movement. But this has not been the case. Indeed, the seminar offered a unique opportunity for approaching the uncharted field of women’s studies from different vantage points-from the perspective of its relationship to specific disciplines in the social sciences and humanities, as well as its role in the creation of new

Thinking about Politics and State Power with Vina Mazumdar

If there is one question that bedevils the women’s movement and women’s studies in India today, it is that of state power and our political understanding and engagements with such power. We are living in a time of unprecedented abuses by the state, the militarisation of increasing parts of our country, abdication in the realm of welfare and deepening processes of neo-liberalisation, all of which are feeding into growing despair and cynicism over what feminist intervention in the realm of government policy could yield. At the same time, there exist countervailing positions and influences. To take a few prominent examples— several women’s organisations have supported the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) and now the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) promulgated by the United Nations to its member nations; the demand for the greater representation of women in legislative bodies and Parliament was raised in 1996 and is periodically revived; advocacy for state accountability and monitoring through gender mainstreaming has found its adherents. All of these seek greater involvement with various aspects of the state apparatus in order to advance the cause of women and their rights. Taken together, this makes for remarkably divergent political orientations among feminists in India today. It is precisely such a situation, characterised by conflicting if not contradictory relationships to the state and to state power, that would benefit from an engagement with the legacy of Vina Mazumdar. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 24(1) 111–125

Feminism, Feminism Everywhere?: Some Reflections on Concepts, Location, and Colonial Modernities

This essay engages with the text The Birth of Chinese Feminism , which centers primarily on the writings of He-Yin Zhen, one of the earliest Chinese feminists, produced at the turn of the twentieth century and translated into English for the first time. He-Yin offered China and the world a unique and forceful theory of women’s enslavement through critiques of conditions in China (past and present), Japan, and contemporary Europe. John’s essay offers a reading of these writings and He-Yin’s arguments in contrast to other Chinese thinkers, as well as the theoretical claims made by the editors of the book. It does so in relation to comparable questions from colonial and contemporary Indian feminism. While endorsing the dangers posed by the current dominance of US academe in terms of its capacity to crowd out alternate concepts and thinking about feminism, especially from colonial spaces, this essay calls for a postnational engagement with the specificities of feminist concepts and vocabularies, whether in the early twentieth century or the present.