Bodies, Boundaries and Genealogies of Connection: Locating Networks of Feminism(s) in India/South Asia

Drawing from the scholarship on women’s history, social movements in the wake of ‘globalisation’, and critical debates in feminism, this paper locates the historically-embedded networks of feminist politics that persistently shape contemporary feminism(s) in India/South Asia. This is an attempt to review the spatial dimensions of connections among the local, national, and global contexts, where gender becomes a foundational category for defining the relations of power. The critical debates on gender, space, and time have contributed to re-thinking the idea of region cutting across geo-political borders and bring the questions of memory within the study of territorial boundedness. How a territorial unit becomes an institutionalised entity of social, cultural, political practices and consciousness can provide an apt conceptual framework for unpacking structures of inequalities that feminist politics addresses. The historical memories have shaped not only the postcolonial nationalist discourses but also became critical for territorialised identities within and across national borders. With a focus on the manners in which discourses of gender violence travel and how unexpected connections among historical events construct different meanings for local and global and the local-global interface, this paper tries to situate the ‘politics of space/time’ in the region of India/South Asia.