Women’s and Gender Studies in India: Crossings

This book frames the major debates and contemporary issues in women’s and gender studies in India. It locates them in the context of key theories, their interlinkages, and significant crossings and overlaps within the field while juxtaposing feminist and queer perspectives.

The essays in the volume foreground emerging challenges as well as offer clues to future trajectories for women’s and gender studies in the country through a comprehensive and interdisciplinary survey of intersectionalities in feminist activism and theory; gender, caste and class; feminist, masculinity, queer and transgender studies; disability and feminism; feminist and queer pedagogies; and Indian, Western and transnational feminisms. The volume traces how gender studies have shaped established social science as well as interpretative and representational discourses (psychoanalysis, literature, aesthetics, cinema, new media studies and folklore). It examines their strategic potential to draw upon and transform these areas in national and international contexts.

This book will be useful to students, teachers and researchers in women’s studies, gender studies, cultural studies, queer studies and South Asian studies.

Anu Aneja is Professor at the School of Gender and Development Studies, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi, India, and is currently Associate Editor for Gender and Education. She taught for several years at Ohio Wesleyan University, USA, where she was the recipient of the Rebecca Brown Professor of Literature award. She was awarded the Beatrice B. Maines fellowship for research in women’s studies, at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include feminist theory and aesthetics; contemporary French, francophone and Indian women writers; feminist perspectives on mothering; and feminist pedagogy. Her publications have appeared in various international journals. She is the author of Embodying Motherhood: Perspectives from Contemporary India (co-authored with Shubhangi Vaidya, 2016) and the editor of Gender and Distance Education: Indian and International Contexts (2019). She has previously served as Chairperson, Department of Humanities and Classics, Ohio Wesleyan University; and Director, School of Continuing Education, and Director, School of Gender and Development Studies, IGNOU. She has also served on the editorial team of the Indian Journal of Open Learning, IGNOU.