ABSTRACT
Women’s and gender studies departments and centres have come a fair way from their marginal existence in the 1970s and 1980s to become more regular features of universities and institutions of higher education across India today. The significant uptick in their numbers, however, is the work often of a policy push through UGC and other government agencies or, in more recent times, the corporate play to commoditize and vend tertiary education. This chapter focuses on questions of not just what gets taught as part of different WGS initiatives but also how it is taught, and further how WGS (re)configures the academic space, comprehends the teacher-taught equation and defines its pedagogical activity. Pedagogies are seldom hermetic assemblies of instructional precepts, evaluative protocols, discursive proclivities and research methodologies operating in a vacuum. Instead, they are philosophies in action: diversely encoded disciplinary practices that consciously or unconsciously reflect, reinforce, rework and/or rescind world views and values generated by the dynamic interplay of various determining forces at any given conjuncture. Periodical rethinks are crucial to prevent WGS from lapsing into a merely ‘disciplined’ and ‘disciplinary’ curriculum answering to establishment norms and market imperatives. The present chapter is a small attempt in that direction.
