Gendered Minoritization In Turbulent Times: Feminist Politics across South Asia

This session examines how women and gender-diverse people from minoritised communities across South Asia negotiate resurgent patriarchies, contested identities, and struggles over belonging in turbulent social and political times. Rather than treating “minority women” as a fixed demographic category, it foregrounds gendered minoritisation as a process shaped by religion, caste, ethnicity, language, migration, citizenship, class, sexuality, and state power.

Across South Asian contexts, women and gender-diverse subjects are often positioned at the intersection of community expectations, patriarchal authority, majoritarian politics, nationalist projects, legal regimes, and dominant feminist representations. Their bodies, voices, dress, sexuality, labour, education, mobility, and public presence frequently become sites through which wider anxieties about honour, identity, modernity, citizenship, and community survival are articulated and contested.

The session seeks to move beyond simple binaries of oppression and liberation by foregrounding feminist standpoints, lived experiences, everyday negotiations, and forms of resistance. It welcomes theoretical and empirical papers on gendered minoritisation, religious and caste minorities, ethnic and linguistic identities, nationalism, communalism, law, violence, education, migration, representation, care, and feminist politics in South Asia. Comparative and cross-national contributions that place India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, and South Asian diasporas in conversation are especially welcome.

A central concern is how feminist sociology can critically examine patriarchal power within communities while also resisting majoritarian, colonial, and nationalist uses of women’s issues to stigmatise minoritised groups. The session speaks to feminist knowledge production and to feminist resistance against authoritarianism, nationalism, and violence across institutional, familial, legal, and everyday public arenas of power.