Gender and Violence in Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

This book covers a range of issues and phenomena around gender-related violence in specific cultural and regional conditions. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it discusses historical and contemporary developments that trigger violence while highlighting the social conditions, practices, discourses, and cultural experiences of gender-related violence in India. Beginning with the issues of gender-based violence within the traditional context of Indian history and colonial encounters, it moves on to explore the connections between gender, minorities, marginalisation, sexuality, and violence, especially violence against Dalit women, disabled women, and transgender people. It traces and interprets similarities and differences as well as identifies social causes of potential conflicts. Further, it investigates the forms and mechanisms of political, economic, and institutional violence in the legitimation or de-legitimation of traditional gender roles. The chapters deal with sexual violence, violence within marriage and family, influence of patriarchal forces within factory-based gender violence, and global processes such as demand-driven surrogacy and the politics of literary and cinematic representations of gender-based violence. The book situates relevant debates about India and underlines the global context in the making of the gender bias that leads to violence both in the public and private domains.

An important contribution to feminist scholarship, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of gender studies, women’s studies, history, sociology, and political science.

Jyoti Atwal is Associate Professor of Modern Indian History at the Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and Adjunct Professor, Department of History, Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Limerick, Ireland. Her areas of specialisation include Indian women in the reformist, nationalist, and international contemporary perspectives; socio-cultural and religious aspects of women’s lives in colonial and postcolonial India; women’s agenda and the nation; and entangled histories of Indian and Irish women. She has published Real and Imagined Widows: Gender Relations in Colonial North India (2016). Currently, she is writing a biography of Margaret Cousins (1878–1954) exploring the life and work of an Irish suffragette in India.

Iris Flessenkämper is Executive Manager and Postdoctoral Researcher of the Cluster of Excellence "Religion and Politics" at the University of Münster, Germany. She received her PhD in Early Modern History in 2007 from the University of Augsburg. Her fields of interest include gender history in Early Modern Germany, Reformation history, and European Enlightenment. She is presently in charge of a project dealing with marital conflicts and competing marriage norms in Early Modern Germany.