Contemporary Gender Formations in India: In-between Conformity, Dissent and Affect

The volume discusses critical issues surrounding the developments in gender movements in the last two decades in India following the Delhi rape case and the ensuing massive protests in December 2012. A critical documentation of some of the key moments surrounding the contemporary gendered formations and radicalisms in South Asia, the chapters span questions of class, caste, sexuality, digital feminisms, and conflict zones.

The book looks at anger, protest, and imaginations of resistance. It showcases the ‘new’ visibility that digital spaces have opened up to lend voice to survivors who are let down by traditional justice mechanisms and raises questions regarding ‘individualized’ modes of seeking justice as against traditional ‘collective’ voices that have always been a hallmark of movements. The volume analyses and criticizes the complicity of the state and the court as agents of reinforcing gender violence – an issue that has not been theorized enough by activists and scholars of violence. Further, it also delves into the #MeToo movement and the LoSHA, as both have raised contentious, controversial, and often conflicting debates on the nature of addressing sexual harassment, particularly at the workplace.

Calling for further debate and discussions of cyberspace, gender justice, sexual violence, male entitlement, and forms of neoliberal feminism, this volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers in the areas of women and gender studies, sociology and social theory, gender politics, political theory, democracy, protest movements, politics, media and the internet, political advocacy, and law and legal theory. It will also be a compelling read for anyone interested in gender justice and equal rights.

Nandini Dhar is Associate Professor of Literary and Gender Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University at Sonipat, India. As a scholar, she is primarily concerned with the writing of neoliberal subjectivities in Global Anglophone late twentieth- and twenty-first-century literatures. Her essays have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, The Comparatist, A/B: Auto/Biography Studies, and several other edited anthologies. Nandini is also a poet and is the author of the full-length collection, Historians of Redundant Moments: A Novel in Verse (2016).