ABSTRACT
At the end of Part I, I identified four challenges to feminist theories of identity and difference that emerge from a critical reading of Indian feminist scholarship:
• first, feminist theoretical approaches to identity need to focus on the productive but subordinated role that ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ play in the simultaneous emergence of multiple categories of social identity, including sex, gender, nation, race and other community identities;
• second, they need to recognise that women’s location within this intersecting landscape of social identities is a complex one that is not easily contained within a logic of dualisms;
• third, they need to take into account not only discursive constructs of the feminine, but also the female body and its relation to women’s activities;
• fourth, they need to redefine, and not only destabilise or deconstruct, models of the individual self and its relation to collective identities.
