Teaching/Writing Resistance: Women’s Studies in Contemporary Times

Women’s studies in India occupies a special place in history. Emerging with a radical women’s movement in the 1970s that was committed to social, economic, and sexual justice and premised on a discourse of emancipation, the newly-founded ‘women’s studies centres’ challenged received wisdom about social norms and structures. They introduced a new interdisciplinary focus based on social identity, sparking important transformations in the academy and in public discourse. However, the position of women’s studies within higher education is becoming increasingly precarious. Teaching/Writing Resistance brings together a diverse set of essays around women’s studies as a formal discipline, and raises important questions: What are its achievements, and equally, what are its historical blind spots and faultlines? Has women’s studies emerged as a critical space within the academy—as its pioneers envisioned—or does it remain limited by institutional bias and social inequality? Drawing on the perspectives of stalwarts of women’s movements who fought to establish the discipline and younger scholars who now address critical debates in the field, the chapters explore a variety of themes: pedagogical practices; the relation between knowledge production and university structures; the role of social, regional, religious, and caste locations in the way women’s studies is perceived and transacted; and for the first time, the crucial relation between feminist scholarship and State and institutional power, both in India and internationally. Insightful and incisive, this book will interest students of women’s and gender studies, feminist practitioners, educators, NGOs, and the general reader.