ABSTRACT
As I argued in Chapter 1, one of the issues to concern Indian feminists in recent years has been the ‘curious visibility of women’ in colonial and postcolonial discourses and practices centring on national and other community identities. This has raised a number of conceptual challenges for Indian feminists when they turn to the question of women’s agency and resistance. How are feminism’s claims for women to be distinguished from other discourses and practices that might focus on ‘Woman’ and ‘women’, but which don’t seem to advance the cause of women very much? Do these discourses and practices always constitute ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ as a passive, silenced and powerless ground upon which national or raced identities are constructed? Is this only a question of women being objectified across a more complicated set of networks, but with the same moves of exclusion, repression or objectification being enacted across those different categories? And conversely, is any foregrounding of women as active agents necessarily a form of resistance to this subordination?
