Political Transformations: collaborative feminist scholarship in Nepal

Abstract

Feminist theory has expanded the sphere within which politics is assumed to occur and thus can make significant contributions to research on state transition. This paper traces the development of a research project wherein we combined our expertise and feminist commitments to explore the current political transition in Nepal. The project conceptualized market formation and resource governance to be important sites of political contestation and the formation of citizen subjectivities. Within these sites, we sought to understand what 'democracy' looks like at different scales, especially where, when and how people make claims and build critical accounts of established social systems in its name. Here, we reflect how on our feminist political and intellectual commitments helped develop a collaborative methodology and approach to state transition that integrates 'politics' across scales. The insights include the role played by spaces of social reproduction in everyday processes of state and political transformation, and the analytical opportunities opened up when research collaborations take the form of a community of inquiry within the field itself. We found ourselves turning back to the long tradition of feminist scholarship to show how the household is the origin of inequalities and how such relations transmit into wider contestations over 'democracy'.