ABSTRACT
At this juncture of analysing the gender discourse of Naxalbari it is required to retrace some aspects of the theoretical framework, especially how gendered narratives of participation are implicated in the framing processes and how different framings converge at particular sites of social relations and/or interactions. Framing of difference, as I have argued in the Chapter 2, is the principal theoretical framework of this book.1 In the Chapters 3 and 4 I have elaborated on how documents of memory and documents of fiction facilitate identifying the ways in which different aspects of gendered social relations are aligned with each other within the discourse of Naxalbari. Framing, ‘a cognitive ordering that relates events to one another’, however, needs to take into account the historical evolution of normative elements that influence particular modes of ordering cognition (Ferree and Merrill 2004, 249). In the gendered readings of collective action frames2 emotions are considered as equally important as cognition (Ferree and Merrill 2004, 247-61). The separa - tion of cognition and emotion tends to evade intertwined characteristics of value-loaded political choices and collective/individual actions. The feminist critique of rational political choice has revealed that gendered meanings are entrenched, often unobtrusively, in the domain of institutional politics and that the hierarchical distinction between reason and emotion is irrelevant for gender politics and gendered politics.
