Suchergebnisse

This article explores the many ways that sociologies and feminisms have intersected with an equal emphasis on the actual content of these intersections as well as on the context. First, the article shows how disciplinary histories and feminist rethinking across 'nations' and 'regions' do bear similarities, but also differ in many significant ways. Second, linked to the matter of contexts and travels is the matter of hierarchies within international academia that acquires new forms in the global context. Third, the national location of the academia continues to matter, evident, for instance, in the rich feminist scholarship on kinship and family studies, which prised open central sociological categories in India, precisely when the field was declared waning in the West and in the feminist engagement with sociology of education which reflects a persistent engagement with India's classrooms and pedagogy. Finally, if these visible new areas of feminist recasting are missed out when counting sociology's tryst with feminism, then we need to ask what is misplaced in the yardsticks of measurements.

Indian media has witnessed an unprecedented growth over the last two decades. This expansion does not necessarily lead to greater democratic participation for the very idea of the 'public' has undergone a transformation, evident in: the ideological content of the media, the extra-national membership of the public sphere and the interactive form of publicness. The article argues that the media plays a crucial ideological role in recasting public discourse in India, a role which is rendered more effective because of a strong synergy between its substance and style. An often strident appropriation of the nation and the Indian 'public' by a middle class ideologically aligned with the project of liberalisation is most evident in the media today. This is done in two ways: by an overt ideological defence of an unbridled market and an attack on the very idea of an interventionist and welfare state; and by the everyday quotidian features and news that inscribe corporate speech, create a new imaginary of a global Indian and a global Indian middle class. This contention may be sustained from a scrutiny of the media even when the period is a random month (24 May–23 June) of a random year (2007), as is the case here.

This paper reflects on the experience of teaching a course on women and society in a sociology department over a period of seven years. This is discussed from different angles—related to sociology and its disciplinary location; questions of women's studies and feminist politics; and the complex dimensions of pedagogy in particular. The diversity amongst students and the politics of the classroom repeatedly emerge as critical issues in the paper. The essay concludes with some theoretical reflections on the problems of relating experience with analysis by drawing on the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel.

Locating the issue of feminism in the institutional context of the print media, we discover two popular versions of feminism that the media promote, a feminism of choice' and a 'traditional feminism'. At the same time, they express hostility, both covert and not-so-covert, to organised women's movements. This simultaneous cooptation and backlash is seemingly a sign of a con sensus over some of feminism's demands, such as equality, while it also perverts the agenda of feminism itself—in the interests of a newly liberalised economy and a resurgent majoritarian religious political party movement.