ABSTRACT

Women Speak Nation underlines the centrality of gender within the ideological construction of nationalism. The volume locates itself in a rich scholarship of feminist critique of the relationship between political, economic, cultural, and social formations and normative gendered relations to try and understand the cross-currents in contemporary feminist theorizing and politics.

The chapters question the gendered depictions of the nation as Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother. The volume also brings together interviews and short essays from practitioners and activists who voice an alternative reimagining of the nation.

The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender, politics, modern South Asian history, and cultural studies.

chapter |16 pages

Women speak nation

An introduction

part I|40 pages

Gender, nation, and nationalism

chapter 1|10 pages

Women and nation revisited

chapter 2|10 pages

The Verma Committee report, 2013

Notes on nation, gender, and crime

chapter 3|18 pages

The gendered nation

To be recoded or rejected?

part II|54 pages

Class-caste-community

chapter 4|20 pages

Shia women and their ‘place-making’

Gendered agency in the Muharram gatherings in Kolkata

chapter 5|14 pages

Speaking in a different voice

Dalit women writing in Bengali

chapter 6|18 pages

Dance of dissent

Dancing Tagore in the age of nationalism

part III|73 pages

Women’s movement(s), representations, and resistances

chapter 7|18 pages

Towards reparative readings

Reflections on feminist solidarities in a troubling present

chapter 8|19 pages

Political motherhood and a spectacular resistance

(Re)examining the Kangla Fort Protest, Manipur

chapter 9|13 pages

‘Their’ suicide letter

An exercise in reading that is always incomplete

chapter 10|21 pages

Inside/out

Women’s movement and women in movements

part IV|39 pages

Voices of dissent

chapter 11|8 pages

Resisting AFSPA, fighting the nation

An interview with Irom Sharmila Chanu

chapter 12|14 pages

Narratives from Bastar

An interview with Soni Sori

chapter 13|5 pages

Living in Curfewland

Kashmir 2016

chapter 14|8 pages

Coal mining and ecological fragility

Questioning development, questioning growth