Vilifying Dalit women

Dalit Textuality and Sexuality: Narrative and Gender in Tamil Women’s Writing

“…Kandasamy not unlike Sivakami again resurrects Guru and Sarukkai’s (2012) dialectics between history and literature, experience and theory. ‘The challenge posed by Guru is as follows—What authorises the researcher (Kandasamy) to communicate the operation of her participant?’ (Mahadevan, 2020, p. 230). Kandasamy makes the novel a collaborative venture, and in doing so, attempts to remedy the gap between Dalit women’s experience and the novelist’s theorising practice.…”

“…The relationship between objective presentation expertise of the researcher Kandasamy and the subjective experiential expertise of the seven Gypsy mothers can be viewed through Kanchana Mahadevan’s idea of ‘empathy’ and ‘care’. By entering into Kilvenmani, the non-Dalit feminist researcher is ‘living (not objectifying) and experiencing one’s body in intersubjective (and not isolated) contexts that [minimise] the gap between subjects and objects’ (Mahadevan, 2020, p. 232). Mahadevan further argues that While listening to the narration of the lived oppression of a Dalit woman, the privileged feminist woman would lose her separate isolated subjectivity.…”

Outsourcing Patriarchy To and Within India: Intersectional and Decolonial Gender Politics Across Scales

“…She argues that single‐axis thinking, that is, thinking in terms of a single axis of oppression such as gender or caste or religion alone, rather than in terms of how these structures of oppression intersect, has been a problem in the Indian context too, and the intersectionality frame is useful in highlighting this. Arya and Rathore (2019) make similar arguments, asserting the relevance of intersectionality for understanding the patriarchal practices of Dalit (communities against whom untouchability has been practiced) politics, and the ways India’s feminist movement has perpetuated the dominance of Brahmins (the highest caste or varna in Hinduism) and the oppression of Dalits and Bahujans (marginalised castes who are not Dalit). Sharmila Rege (2000:495) describes intersectionality as a “powerful resource” in a paper on the meaning of a Dalit feminist standpoint, and Anandhi (2013) uses the term to describe caste patriarchy among Dalits in rural Tamil Nadu.…”

Subnational Enterprise: Militarized Mothering, Women’s Entrepreneurial Labour and Generational Dynamics in the Gorkhaland Struggle

“…In thinking through the framework of subnational enterprise, few ethnographies of women’s enterprise and entrepreneurialism in South Asia (Moodie, 2008; Purkayastha & Subramaniam, 2004; Radhakrishnan 2018; Sharma, 2008) were particularly useful. In addition to the growing body of South Asian feminist work which illuminates the complicated roles and subjectivities women occupied within social movements (Arya & Rathore, 2019; Roy, 2012; Sangari, 1996; Sinha Roy, 2006), I found Carla Freeman’s concept of ‘entrepreneurial selves’ to add a new dimension by examining the shifting meanings of women’s labour between multiple phases of the Gorkhaland movement in Darjeeling district, India. I uphold women’s enterprise through vignettes of women actors and activists from different phases of the Gorkhaland movement and argue that these entrepreneurial practices build on earlier forms of reproductive labour exemplified in decades of militarized mothering ubiquitous in the social life of Darjeeling.…”