Suchergebnisse

About the editor; Title page; Copyright; Table of contents; Acknowledgements; Foreword by Shirin M. Rai; Reference; Introduction: paradoxes and possibilities; Feminist loss and hope; South Asian feminisms; Feminism institutionalized; Witnessing and resisting violence; A new generation of feminists: spaces and practices of 'young' feminists; Conclusion; Notes; References; 1 Sex workers' rights and women's movements in India: a very brief genealogy; Feminism and sex work; 'The woman question'; Trafficking and prostitution; History and feminism; Force, choice and race (and caste).

This text explores the production of cultural memory in relation to women's involvement in the late 1960s' radical Naxalbari movement of West Bengal. Drawing from historiographic, popular and personal memoirs, it provides an innovative conceptual analysis of the Naxalbari movement principally in terms of gender, violence, and subjectivity.

AbstractYoung urban Indian women have made women's rights to seek pleasure and have fun, especially in public, central to a new repertoire of feminist resistance and also as a way of demarcating themselves from "joyless" feminisms of the past. Concerns around pleasure, fun, and joy appear far removed from the everyday lives of poor and marginalized rural women. In this contribution, the author foregrounds rural women's pleasure-seeking practices, in consumption, fun, and friendship, which were the unanticipated outcomes of their involvement with a local NGO seeking to empower poor women. These were primarily lower-caste, lower-class women who were partially included in the aspirational futures of a globalized India, through poorly paid and precarious development work. Their participation in such work—a disciplinary domain imbued with its own regulatory potentials—enabled the development of new skills, techniques, and capacities in an entirely other domain, of nonwork or fun. The fact that fun, pleasure, and self-making relied on cultures of enterprise, empowerment, and aspiration also brings into view some of the contradictions at stake in neoliberal India.

While there is a long tradition of interpellating poor rural women to carry out the state's development and modernising goals in local communities, neoliberal development has greatly expanded the remit of this subjective call but without accompanying material changes. In this article, I consider the precarious category of female workers produced by an NGO in West Bengal, out of a surplus population of poor, working-class and, generally, Scheduled-Caste rural women who were themselves beneficiaries of feminist-inspired development. Ambivalently positioned within this institutional site—as volunteers and not as employees—these workers had to manage new forms of risk and precarity over existing ones. Such precarity was not only material. It was especially manifest in new sets of aspirations that sustained the unrealisable promises and potentialities of the related processes of the NGOisation of feminist activism and the restructuring of women's development under neoliberalism.

The article documents some of the transformations to the women's movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in the terrain of Indian feminism, the article focuses on dominant feminist responses to 'NGOization' in the form of critiques of the alleged cooption and professionalization of the women's movement and the loss of political autonomy, a key ideal amongst Indian feminists. As a response to these criticisms, I suggest that there is a need to go beyond the 'NGOization paradigm' in evaluating a new feminist landscape, especially after the Delhi rape of 2012. 'NGOisation' offers limited conceptual tools to make sense of the present moment if not entirely hiding from view the political possibilities that it offers for feminist reflection and (re)mobilization.

The article locates itself in current criticisms of the 'NGOization' and professionalization of women's movements in India. It is concerned with the critique of the instrumentalization of feminism in its '9 to 5ization' together with the rise of a phenomenon that is disparagingly referred to, in generational terms, as the 'career feminist'. In considering two distinct forms of activism and organizational cultures, the article troubles the dichotomy between 'passion' and 'profession' in terms of which feminist activism and identities have come to be understood in India today, in an era of neoliberal development. It uncovers points of convergence and hybridity in contemporary feminist practice.