ABSTRACT
This paper is about men ‘doing’ feminism in the 1980s and early 1990s in Kerala, a period in which feminism as a politics was beginning to take shape. It relies on materials from the late 1980s and early 1990s – especially the debates in Kerala’s public sphere and the Malayalam literary public, and on interviews with prominent feminists who were active in the relevant period. I begin with reflecting on the history of recent feminism in Kerala and then the specific nature of men’s presence, in the next section. In the section that follows, I give an account of the famous debate on feminist writing from this period, popularly known as the pennezhuthu debate, to demonstrate the power relations that structured the positions of men and women within late 1980s–early 1990s feminism. I conclude with some reflections on the present of ‘political feminism’ in Kerala, especially in the wake of the Kiss of Love campaign.
