Invoking Idioms of Kinship in Women’s Movements in South Asia: Towards an Intergenerational Feminist Future

This paper explores the analytical, methodological and political possibilities and challenges of how idioms of kinship are constructed and invoked in the process of forging and tightening intimate bonds amongst women activists in South Asia. It juxtaposes excerpts from conversations with activists across generations against scholarly generational narratives and critiques, thereby offering reflections on how intergenerational kinship idioms are put into use, and what effects these have on conceptualisations and constructions of intimate feminist friendships and solidarities within women's movements.

The paper stages a productive encounter between generations of feminist activists from 16 women’s struggles across four countries (Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan) engaged in feminist solidarity and coalition building in South Asia. Presenting these women’s voices alongside feminist theorisations of and challenges to generational analytical frames, the paper reflects on idioms of kinship repeatedly invoked in telling inter-generational tales. Extending beyond dominant narrations of entitled, ungrateful daughters pitted against capitulating, coopted and even tyrannical mothers of feminism (Hemmings 2017), we explore what these references to kinship reveal about heteropatriarchal structures and logics (and resistance to them) within women’s movements. Exceeding the Euro-centricism of dominant feminist generational accounts (Browne 2014), we amplify post-colonial activist articulations of feminist kinship as a site of both domination and conflict as well as care, mutuality and solidarity. These narratives thereby offer a re-interpretation of kinship idioms as a response to backlash which seeks to rupture, fragment and isolate women’s collective endeavours. The paper argues that in the forging of intergenerational kinship idioms and bonds, women activists become intimate, critical witnesses of a collective struggle and engage in productive tensions propelling movements towards a collectively imagined and negotiated feminist future.