Since my childhood, I understood quite well that "gender" is a troubled water. Women were not allowed access to education, were domesticated, and were not allowed to vote for the longest time in history. Yet I did not quite know how to articulate how it should be! While broadly "gender" still remains a concern, growing as an academic (currently as an Assistant Professor of Social Sciences at National Law School of India University), I started asking how best we can reconcile gender and culture, and even if we do, what does it mean for my country, India and the discipline of International Relations?
I wrote
Lives of Circumcised and Veiled Women: A Global-Indian Interplay of Discourses and Narratives
As a graduate student, I picked up this book on gender and international relations, and there was no turning back; I now knew my domain!
I realized where I stood in the male-dominated discipline of international relations, where concerns of "Man, State, and the War" dominate. The often-overlooked frivolousness of domesticity is also a matter of international relations. This book asks: "Where are women?" as it explores the gendered aspects of everyday life, as often we women tend to ask, navigating through the alleys of personal and professional spaces.
Making feminist sense of international politics requires genuine curiosity about multi-layered women's lives: air hostesses, base women, diplomatic wives, factory and domestic workers, and more. After all, power takes a myriad of avatars; power, taste, attraction, and desire are not mutually exclusive.
The author says it best when remapping the boundaries of international and political, "We are not just acted upon; we are actors."
In this brand new radical analysis of globalization, Cynthia Enloe examines recent events - Bangladeshi garment factory deaths, domestic workers in the Persian Gulf, Chinese global tourists, and the UN gender politics of guns - to reveal the crucial role of women in international politics today. With all new and updated chapters, Enloe describes how many women's seemingly personal strategies - in their marriages, in their housework, in their coping with ideals of beauty - are, in reality, the stuff of global politics. Enloe offers a feminist gender analysis of the global politics of both masculinities and femininities, dismantles an…
What do you see in a woman in the veil? Tragedy and oppression or liberation and empowerment?
This book is a comprehensive and holistic account of veiling beyond these binaries. It sees the practice of veiling beyond the spatiality and specificity of a religion. The chapters set veiling in the context of mythology, history, and regions, as well as explore the politics of it.
This inspired my critical thinking in studying the cultural practice of veiling in its diversity and local manifestation.
This groundbreaking volume, written entirely by women, examines the vastly misunderstood and multilayered world of the veil. Veiling - of women, of men, and of sacred places and objects - has existed in countless cultures and religions from time immemorial. Today, veiling is a globally polarizing issue, a locus for the struggle between Islam and the West and between contemporary and traditional interpretations of Islam. But veiling was a practice long before Islam and still extends far beyond the Middle East. This book explores and examines the cultures, politics, and histories of veiling. Twenty-one gifted writers and scholars, representing a…
We all know that the oppressive structures of patriarchy are all-pervasive. But can we see "oppression" in black and white? Certainly not!
Unless we put things in context and see through their nuances, the vicious Islamophobic tendency (subtly or not) comes into play, caricaturing Islam as the sole source of gender-based oppression. No doubt, the condemnation of Islam flows from prejudice and half-baked Orientalist assumptions surrounding the religion.
Leila Ahmed, a pioneering figure of Islamic feminism, hits hard at the stereotypes surrounding Islam and challenges them. I learned from her that Islam is anything but monolithic, especially from the perspective of gender. She devotes chapters on Egypt to link the percepts of Islam with colonial modernisation.
For academics like me, this book adds a dynamic perspective and opens the big picture. However, for even those bearing the burden of prejudice, I am sure this book will be educative.
A classic, pioneering account of the lives of women in Islamic history, republished for a new generation
This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women from Arabia during the period in which Islam was founded to Iraq during the classical age to Egypt during the modern era. The book is now reissued as a Veritas paperback, with a new foreword by Kecia Ali situating the text in its scholarly context and explaining…
What may be construed as violence is a matter of the vantage point and the politics of language (the language of culture vs. the language of the state) surrounding human rights. Rogers paints a unique parallel between female circumcision and torture from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Both entail bodily "mutilation" or disfiguration of a certain kind, yet they are treated differently in the discourses of human rights. The cut flesh of the circumcised woman becomes the sole bearer of the truth surrounding the "violative" cultural practice.
But, the act of state-sponsored torture perpetrated on the purported terrorists, who are imprisoned without a trial (e.g., the prisoners of Abu Gharib), escapes the landscape of human rights (why would you care for the rights of the terrorists?). After all, "sacred" is such flesh that is rendered legitimate in the fantasy of the sovereign nation-state!
This book is an eye-opener to me. It implies that rights do not ensure the same entitlement for all humans; violence is not equally reproachable across contexts. I can guarantee that this book will leave you thinking about human rights like never before!
Scenes of violence and incisions into the flesh inform the demand for law. The scene of little girls being held down in practices of female circumcision has been a defining and definitive image that demands the attention of human rights, and the intervention of law. But the investment in protecting women and little girls from such a cut is not all that it seems. Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh considers how such images come to inform law and the investment of advocates of law in an imagination of this scene. Drawing…
This is a fiction book with deep roots in history. It touches on race in ways that international relations ignore. The question of gender and culture gets weaved in history as Effia and Esi's (two estranged sisters) stories are told and their journeys unfold generationally. At the end of the book, you will long for a "home" which you may truly call your own!
You may be curious how this fiction book shapes my worldview as a non-fiction and academic writer. To me, fiction is grounded in the multitude of emotions and experiences of reality. The art of storytelling tells us a million about how narratives are created and represented.
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. Taking us from the Gold Coast of Africa to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, Yaa Gyasi has written a miraculous novel - the intimate, gripping story of a brilliantly vivid cast of characters and through their lives the very story of America itself.…
The trajectories and narratives around Khafz (female circumcision), an unspeakable truth, and hijab, a perennial eye of the political storm, take disparate routes, both internationally and in India.
A procedural reiteration involving female private parts in the most invasive form of female circumcision/female genital cutting (FC/FGC) is construed as a violation of rights. However, in veiling, owing to the exteriority of sartorial practice, the language of rights takes the form of choice. In this liberal conundrum of rights and choices, where do we locate women's agency? Amid the world of binaries and polarised opinions, the book offers a nuanced analysis of the space in between, characterised by narratives from Indian women.
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
Historical fiction inspired by the story of Mary Leakey, who carved her own path to become one of the world's most distinguished paleoanthropologists.
It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories.
Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations. When well-known paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey…
