590
Intersectionality, Gender, Politics and Violence: Shifting Contexts, Contemporary Challenges
Language: English
Session Organisers: Kalpana Kannabiran & Bandana Purkayastha
Over the years, scholars have pointed out that the rich and growing literature on intersectionality needs to be democratized, drawing on writing and ideas from different locations – social, spatial, political and disciplinary. Specificities of race, region, caste, religion, indigeneity, culture, community, politics, conflict, and historical moments/processes like colonisation, war, genocide, partition, occupation, neoliberal globalisation, nationalist assertion, and migration lead to specific ontological commitments and epistemological standpoints about the place of women in the emergent social imaginary. Interweaving with this is a gender order that is not binary. Indeed, intersectionality is enriched through multiplicities that disamantle binaries, cross borders and interrogate boundaries. We take note also of Connell’s concern about the ‘structural problem of feminist thought on a world scale’ (Connell 2015) that refuses recognition to ideas from the global periphery.
Criss-crossing through this entire terrain is the feminist resistance to violence emanating within a continuum from inter-state wars, to violence within families; as also the bridges between the various sites and languages of resistance in different locales.
In this invited session scholars from India, Trinidad, Palestine, Kasmir, Turkey, and Canada will address the ways in which these locations might prompt feminist scholars to re-constitute the very category of gender, exploring new ways in which ideas of intersectionality may be opened out.