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The aftermath of protests triggered by a brutal gang-rape in New Delhi in December 2012 was archetypal of the broader women's movement in post-independence India. The primary demands of the social movement to address sexual violence against women were wrapped in the language of rights-based reforms in criminal law provisions. The state responded to the social mobilization in the form of criminal law amendments, while blindsiding key recommendations from feminist groups. This Article revisits pertinent Law Commission reports, subsequent criminal law reforms, and case law on sexual violence against women to analyze how the negotiations between the women's movement and the State on the seemingly irreconcilable demands of sexual autonomy and punishment for sexual violence. We take account of the intended and unintended consequences of this reliance on criminal law as one of the primary tools in the arsenal of Indian women's movements. We argue that engagement on the plane of criminal law to address sexual violence against women is a case of limited imagination at best and counter-productive at its worst. This approach of the movement and feminist groups is to react to the "crime" of sexual violence after the fact, leading to distraction from much warranted structural responses. We argue that this approach makes it harder to conceptualize and implement more forward-looking relational models of responsibility that are necessary to address the structural injustice of systemic sexual violence against women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The sociology of social movements has often drawn a fine line between individualistic “lifestyle movements” and more politically oriented collective action. Yet, this distinction belies the fact that seemingly individualistic movements can generate cognitive maps and associational ties necessary for wider mobilization. Drawing on a qualitative study of the Indian men’s feminist movement Men’s Action to Stop Violence against Women (MASVAW), we examine how an ostensibly individualistically oriented lifestyle movement can create the potential for collective action through forging social networks of like-minded individuals who can draw on local knowledge of specific situations to quickly mobilize their peers. Through this, we contribute to the literature on social movement networks by synthesizing theorizing on lifestyle movements with theorizing on activist social networks, demonstrating how networks can shift movements between different modes of coordination, from individualistic and everyday to collective and activist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the critique of what has been termed as "governance feminism" and analyses its conceptual utility with reference to the legal reform process undertaken in India in the aftermath of the Delhi anti-rape demonstrations of late 2012-early 2013. Governance feminism refers to the process by which feminists influence institutional decisions and policy, and critiques of governance feminism focus on its tendency to maintain an equivalence between womanhood and victimhood, and its blindness to unintended consequences of feminist legal reform. This paper will reflect on the critiques that have been made of governance feminist interaction with the state, and examine their exportability to the Indian context, with reference to Indian feminist engagement with the Justice Verma Committee (JVC) that was set up to make recommendations to the criminal law. I will go on to argue that the critiques that have been made of governance feminist intervention in the West have limited exportability to the Indian context. The insights of the governance feminist critique remain invaluable, and the methodological emphasis that it places on unintended consequences are of relevance to Indian feminists who (like any feminist movement) do not operate as a monolithic movement, but are constantly negotiating unstable political categories and identities. However, this paper will pay attention to the fact that where the Indian feminist movement was self-critical in its recommendations for legal reform, they were largely unsuccessful in having them reflected in the Ordinance and Act later passed. In the light of this, it will argue that while the governance feminist critique tends to espouse taking a break from feminism to account for other justice projects, the Indian feminist's experience suggests that feminists may be better off taking a break from the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumen Las tasas femeninas de actividad y empleo caen desde mediados del decenio de 2000 en toda la India, y en particular en Kerala, que era históricamente el estado con mejores resultados. Se analiza la evolución de estas tasas en Kerala entre 2004 y 2012, según ingresos de los hogares, edad, nivel de instrucción y categoría ocupacional. Las jóvenes más calificadas abandonan la vida activa, lo que hace pensar en un desaliento exacerbado por el aumento de la brecha salarial de género en las ocupaciones de más alto nivel. Estos cambios están eliminando algunos de los logros que hasta ahora distinguían al mercado de trabajo de Kerala. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on existing writing about the National Emergency in India that took place between 1975 and 1977. The birth of many social movements during the 1970s, including the women's movement, has been marked by certain default notions of the political that hail from that time, especially given the nature of the repressive power of those years. This paper seeks to reopen the all-too-legible understanding of power and politics that has become prominent and does so by reviewing some of the major writing on the National Emergency. Far from being a suppressed or silenced topic, what is noteworthy, when we look at the wide array of approaches among scholars concerned with the Emergency, is the extraordinary divergence in interpretations that have been put forward but which have hardly been discussed. Some have viewed the Emergency years as having been a relatively insignificant moment in post-independence history, others see it as an illustration of the specific nature of “Caesarist” power, while others have characterized it as being a “critical event,” a “watershed” or even a time when progressive change could be initiated. Taken together, these views demand a rethinking of politics on the part of social movements that goes beyond a repressive notion of power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article employs the example of the use of the writ of Habeas Corpus in cases involving lesbian women in India. These cases, few and far between, provide a broad canvas to theoretically reflect on the relationship of the lives of queer women with the law as well as with the women’s movement and the queer movement in India. The article proposes a critical analyses of the way the law frames identities, struggles and movements and suggests possible direction for theoretical perspectives that take on this nexus and evolve a language that is closer to the reality of the lives addressed in legal, academic and activist work, with all its conflicts, contradictions and chaos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Violence against women is increasingly seen as a key women's rights issue in India. Some efforts to address it have started to engage men. The current study focuses on the impacts of Men's Action to Stop Violence Against Women (MASVAW), a network of men working on gender-based violence in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in India. The purpose of the study was to determine the extent to which MASVAW activists incorporate gender-equitable attitudes and practices into their own lives and to identify their influence on men around them. The cross-sectional study includes three groups: activists, men living in an area where activists conducted outreach activities and a control group living in an area with no MASVAW activities. Both activists and activist influenced men scored higher on measures of gender-equitable beliefs and practices than controls, suggesting that MASVAW activism is successful. Furthermore, men from the activist influenced group scored higher in gender progressiveness even if they did not have contact with MASVAW themselves, suggesting a diffusion effect of social change. However, there were some areas where the activists had low scores, suggesting need for additional inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The SlutWalk campaigns around the world have triggered a furious debate on whether they advance or limit feminist legal politics. This article examines the location of campaigns such as the SlutWalk marches in the context of feminist legal advocacy in postcolonial India, and discusses whether their emergence signifies the demise of feminism or its incarnation in a different guise. The author argues that the SlutWalks, much like the Pink Chaddi (panty) campaign in India, provide an important normative and discursive challenge to a specific strand of feminism based on male domination and female subordination in the area of sexuality and also speaks to the emergence of consumer agency in the very heart of pleasure in the neo-liberal moment. It serves as a space clearing gesture, a form of feminism 'lite', rather than offering a transformative or revolutionary politics, and thus enables the possibility of feminist theoretical positions in a postcolonial context that have hitherto been marginalised or ignored in feminist legal advocacy in India to emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the work of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), urban Bengali Muslim educator and writer, placing her in the wider context of women organising themselves in associations to create social change through education for women, in the province of undivided Bengal in colonial India, from c. 1900 to c. 1932. A subject of the British Indian Empire, Rokeya, and many of her colleagues, wrote back to the empire against both colonialism and patriarchy, and created innovative educational discourses and practices. The history of education is inscribed not merely in the formal school that Rokeya founded, but in her larger career as writer and builder of women's associations. An analysis of the enmeshing of women's writing and women's networks thus yields a creative, nuanced history of women's education. This paper also connects micro-histories and macro-histories of women's education, correlating macro-level data about Indian non-governmental agency in advancing female education with the work of individual figures such as Rokeya. The paper analyses Rokeya's novella Padmarag (“The Ruby”), showing that the integrated paradigm of women's educational and welfarist work found here has many similarities with the actual educational-welfarist work done by women such as Ramabai, Sarala Ray, or Abala Bose. Through her activities and writing, often made in alliance with other educating women such as Sarala, Rokeya gave voice to ideologies and views widely at variance with conservative Indian nationalists and hegemonic British colonial officialdom. The paper also shows that women of different races and religions formed networks and alliances, in the transnational British Empire, to further women's emancipation and education, in bodies such as All India Women's Conference and Bengal Women's Education League. The paper recognises how much women such as Rokeya were able to actually be and actually do in achieving social change in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that it is overwhelmingly women who access and use public services to meet household needs, despite differences in women's societal position across regions of the world. It is noted that women tend to have greater responsibility in the household division of labor for education, health and clothing, while men's roles are seen as ensuring the economic stability of the family. The article also discusses women's collective action and service delivery and its implications for women's movements in Kerala, South India and the Philippines.

This paper explains the success of civic actors in achieving their aims by reference to their organizational structure. Based on a comparison of a religious nationalist movement and a women's movement in South Asia, I argue that organizational structure is closely linked to the success of a social movement. The lack of coordination and collaboration among women's groups in terms of mission and strategy has led to a perception of the overall movement as weak and marginal. The superior coordination of strategy and mission within the religious nationalist movement have allowed it to effectively use its resources to cause great changes in Indian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do national movements adopt or reject international agendas? This question regarding the relationship between global and local thinking goes to the heart of the current globalization debates. This study examines the contrasting responses from the Chinese and Indian women's movements to the agenda adopted by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The contrast challenges the dominant assumption that global thinking can substitute for local thinking. The article shows how national movements decided for or against international agendas through context-dependent meaning-making processes. The Chinese and Indian movements drew on the international agenda to pursue similar national policy goals. Each reached its decision on the international agenda through a similar sequence of interactions with the government. However, due to mediation by nationally unique combinations of political rules and policy-related timing, the two movements attached opposite meanings to the international agenda. The Chinese movement embraced the international agenda and reinterpreted it by emphasizing its difference from the government position; the Indian movement used the international agenda as a surrogate target and rejected it by emphasizing its similarities to the government position. The article also proposes an alternative conceptualization of authoritarianism and democracy that understands better international influences on social movement dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assertion of Dalit interests has posed new challenges for the women's movement in India, which has been criticised for its lack of engagement with Dalit women and their interests. Some women's activists have begun to respond to this critique. Yet this article argues that caste identity still determines the place that women activists – upper caste and Dalit – are given by villagers in their fieldwork and within women's organisations. The article also explores how Dalit women are using their caste identity, alongside their identity as village-level activists, to further their interests beyond the realm of women's activism. By doing so, they are celebrating their personal experiences as political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses empirical data from the author's own South India household survey, which compares the impact of slightly diverging credit schemes upon selected indicators of allocative behavior to test the value added of an economic institutional approach for modeling intrahousehold allocation. It is argued that the income-pooling test and conventional neoclassical household models inadequately picture what happens within households as they start from the premise that behavior is built solely upon free agency. An alternative economic institutional approach is proposed and an expanded test framework is set out. Empirical research findings show that unveiling decision-making processes may indicate why individuals act as if they hold common preferences. The article suggests that changes in selected allocative outcomes occur mainly as a result of changes in underlying allocative processes and further demonstrates that membership in women's groups is one effective way of changing intrahousehold decision-making processes and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considers why a post-colonial feminist theology in India needs to relate to people's movements and how. Condition of Christianity in India as of April 2005; Factors that need to be considered to create a post-colonial feminist theology in India; Historical dimension of people's movements.

Discusses the impact of ecofeminism in India. Information on a political uprising in the form of an Adivasi-Dalit movement for land rights and self-determination in Kerala; Types of ecofeminism; Concerns of elitist ecologists; Qualities of cultural and social feminists.

Focuses on the history of feminist social movements in India. Role of social movements in contemporary poverty; Public debates over women's rights in the context of social reform movements; Central emphasis on women's lack of economic rights.

The present paper attempts to locus centrally on the women's movement in India and its relationship to the state. The paper explores the relationship in terms of the continuously contested boundaries of private and public realms in the social structure. The multiple identities of the women's movement and the commonalities and specificities of women's experiences that confound the analysis and action of the women's movement. The challenges to the movement in a scenario where the locus of control seems to be shifting from the state to the Supra State, has also been examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of social movement organizations (SMO) being informally structured and effective has puzzled both activists and scholars of many new social movements such as the women's, youth, peace, and environmental movements. These movements are concerned not only with changing social structures, values, and practices, but also the processes by which changes are sought. The question itself reflects a major theoretical debate in the social movement literature. Women's movements like the Stree Mukti Sangharsh in India, were primarily informal discussions and exchanges of information and resources about campaign issues. Such informality is a product of the larger social movement culture in India. Social movements in India have not undergone the level of professionalization as of those in Western countries. Most movements do not have the material resources or personnel to develop formal SMO and networks. Furthermore, most movements share the commitment to participatory structures and attempt to reproduce them, even at the network level. Because informal networks reduce conflicts over ideology and have low maintenance costs, they may be more viable than previously assumed.

This paper reconceptualizes the political environment with in which a social movement organization operates by offering the concept of political fields, arguing that the actions, rhetoric, and effectiveness of organizations are best understood within the context of the fields within which they are situated. By examining the issue of violence against women in two different fields within the same country, India, it suggests that the structure of the field and an organization `s position within it I) shape the discourse and practice of SMOs; 2) mediate the effects of organization type (politically affiliated or autonomous); and 3) determine whether or not organizations within the same movement (and field) converge or differentiate. The data for this paper comes from fieldwork conducted between 1990 and 1994, as well as newspaper accounts, and movement archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The AIDS epidemic has had little impact on the gender differences in willingness to engage in casual sex encountered by Clark and Hatfield (1989) 10 years ago. Whereas both men and women were willing to data a stranger, it was only the males who were willing to go to a female's apartment or to bed with her. These results from two experiments are consistent with the sociobiological framework. In addition, the results of Experiment 2 indicated that females were not saying no due to a concern for personal safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses legal, social, political and other aspects of female foeticide. While there is a growing feminist unease at the interference of law with sexuality, critiques tend to understand the failure of the legal system to deliver justice as resulting from its sexist interpretation by biased functionaries. On the contrary, law functions by assuming certainty and exactitude through the creation of uniform categories out of a multiplicity of identities and meaning. In India, the issue of abortion has the lexicon of feminist struggle through a very different trajectory from that followed in the West.

The article discusses the role of women in Pakistan's development. It states that one factor that suggests the dawn of muslim women's awakening to the political problems is the entry of Abadi Begam into the field of politics after her sons was arrested. In 1929, the All-India Women's conference accepted leadership of the feminist movement in India. Muslim women played an active role in the demand for official recognition of the principle of female sufferage and equal rights as British India citizens. Despite social and political obstructions, their efforts met with partial succes in the Government of India Act in 1935.

The article highlights the Henry Burger Oration of Dr. Duru Shah at The Fourth Scientific Meeting of the Asia Pacific Menopause Federation in Sydney, New South Wales on September 27, 2010. He has discussed the aspects which made the country becomes a pot of cultural and religious diversity and makes it the ideal group to represent the Asian women with varying cultural and religious backgrounds. He has emphasized the role of Indian women in medieval and in modern times. He has tackled the formation of the Women's Movement in India.

The article focuses on feminism and the history of the Indian nation with reference to the book "The History of Doing," by Radha Kumar. Kumar takes the reader from the first attempts to include women in the nationalist agitation against colonialism to 1990 when, after decades of struggle, the feminist movement stands embattled as right wing politics begin to claim center stage, using many of the tools developed by the feminist movement. It illuminates the depth and variation in women's resistance in India since the nineteenth century. Second, it shows how many of the deepest conflicts that have rocked the nation since its inception in 1947 have beliefs about gender at their core, even though the conflicts are not ostensibly about gender. The book makes distinctions between difference and equality feminism, feminine versus feminist movements, social versus political struggle, and autonomous versus politically affiliated movements. The difference between anti-patriarchal movements and feminist movements, according to Kumar, is that the former affirm the complementarity of men and women's roles in the social world, even as they condemn the privileging of men over women.