Trev Lynn Broughton

Dissonant Voices: The teacher's 'personal' in women's studies

This article grows directly from a collaborative project on the pedagogies of womens studies at the College of Ripon and York, and the University of York, and from the presentation given at the Gender and Education conference at the University of Warwick in April 1999. It is presented as a dialogue which polarises two voices considering a variety of positions adopted by tutors of womens studies in relation to their students, and, in particular, the ways in which the personhood of the tutor is implicit - or implicated - in the praxis of feminist teaching. Rather than moving to any synthesis or resolution of the apparently binary positions voiced, the article goes on to question the notion that the personal is always necessarily good and beneficial within feminist pedagogy, and to posit the liberatory potential of the impersonal for our teaching and our feminism.

A History of English Autobiography

This impressive collection resembles the genre with which it is concerned in so far as it pulls in several directions at once. The volumes blurb encapsulates the tension at the heart of the projec...

Book Review: The Rhetorics of Feminism: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Theory and the Popular Press

and State: Some Implications of the Uniform Civil Code Debates’, is particularly interesting. Here she analyses the tension between creating a uniform civil code, which will identify women as individuals and work to assert women’s individual rights, with the constructed identity of women within various religious communities. As I said in the beginning, this issue is not unique to India and, therefore, her analysis is useful in investigating the polities of other South Asian countries. She discusses the main positions on creating a uniform civil code and feminist interventions in debates about it made on the grounds of gender and citizenship rights, and she examines the possibility of recognizing Indian women as ‘national subjects’, beyond the options they already have, namely, the state and the religious communities they belong to. The third part of the book, ‘Killing Women’, deals with an issue more ‘specific’ to India, female infanticide. Sunder Rajan explores this issue not only as a social crime that highlights the failure of the post-colonial Indian state in reformist intervention and welfare measures, but also as a social phenomenon that may result in Indian girls becoming the children of the state in future, through the programmes and projects created to stop female infanticide. The chapter on Phoolan Devi’s surrender tackles the female outlaw, female citizenship and negotiating with the state. Overall, I find this book compelling and, although specific in its analysis of post-colonial India, it should have an international appeal.