Abstract
This article draws on the classroom experiences of the author to reflect on the pedagogic shifts in Gender Studies. Along with its recognition as being a ‘proper’ discipline and the need to have Gender Studies at all levels in a university, comes the question of legitimacy. It must now be defined by boundaries, protocols and methodologies. I look at the manner in which these conditions unfold in two settings—in the undergraduate and the research classrooms. In the first context, young, freshly-out-of-school students appear to view Gender Studies as a gender sensitisation programme while in the latter methodological/ empirical certainties often take precedence over the need for analytical probing. In both cases, the initial imagination of the subject as a ‘critical perspective’ across disciplines appears to yield to a more official, programmatic understanding. In my own context, I grapple with the simultaneous visibility and reduction of Women’s/Gender Studies.
This article is about the promise and the impossibilities of Women’s/Gender Studies as they unfold in a classroom. Women’s Studies, in its inaugural moment in the 1970s, was conceived as a critical instrument of change that could bridge the fissures between academia and the social and political concerns that drove activist struggles of the time. The women’s movement initiated the search for a ‘new’ knowledge that would be responsive to the lives of the vast majority of poor/ rural/marginalised women who remained outside the orbit of official discourses of planning and modernisation in post-Independence India.
In the wake of Towards Equality, the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI) in 1974, it became apparent that not only were women invisible within the discourse around development but also that the social sciences had failed to provide contemporary analyses of social and cultural structures that were premised on such exclusions. During these tumultuous times, protests by women around the alarming instances of domestic violence, rape, women’s unemployment, economic marginalisation as also media representations that objectified women, pushed feminist academics to raid the hitherto esoteric zone of the disciplines. 1 In these incursions lie the beginnings of Women’s Studies, which has been referred to as the academic arm of the women’s movement. There was a consensus at the first national conference on Women’s Studies in 1981 that this new field of inquiry was not a separate discipline or a special topic but a critical perspective ‘requiring articulation in every discipline, institution in all studies and at all levels’ (John, 2008a, p. 7). The social reform movements of the 19th century had concentrated on women’s education but in a way that would prepare women to be better companions for their educated middle-class husbands. 2 A crucial shift is introduced with Women’s Studies—it was ‘conceived in order to enable the questioning of the existing educational system and dominant systems of knowledge’ (John, 2004, p. 19).
Feminist scholars have exhaustively chronicled the complex and multiple relationships between the women’s movement and Women’s Studies. This article, however, locates itself in a more recent moment when the institutionalisation of Women’s/Gender Studies in university settings is much more of an achieved phenomenon. 3 It is removed from the rough and tumble of the women’s movement even as it is marked by that legacy. One may note that the early envisioning of Women’s Studies as a ‘critical perspective’ across disciplines has by now found a place in the academic and administrative imagination of a large number of universities. This is reflected in the demand on centres of Women’s Studies to offer courses/programmes at various levels and in various locations (including intensive workshops for the administrative staff) of the university. Such official sanction, I hope to demonstrate, is double edged—there is a recognition of the transformative potential of the field, and yet the practical realities of teaching drive home the uncertain terrains that Women’s/Gender Studies must continue to negotiate in the struggle to find legitimacy. This article points to some of these challenges even though it runs the risk of being subjective. I draw from my experience of teaching Gender Studies in a large metropolitan central university, the University of Hyderabad and I hope that some of the questions and concerns will tie in to a larger discussion on the practice of teaching Women’s/Gender Studies. I recount my experiences in two classroom settings—one at the undergraduate level, and the other consisting of students at the MPhil and PhD levels. Both groups of students are clearly different in terms of age, maturity and the level of exposure they have had to the rigours and protocols of the disciplinary settings of a university. The pedagogic experience is substantially shaped through these factors. Students freshly out of school are freer with asserting assumptions and common sense—not worrying too much about being analytical or with using feminist vocabulary. Research students, on the other hand, are more careful about the choice of words, and sometimes combine an analytical register with commonsensical assumptions. In each context the question of gender is articulated with varying degrees of certainty (e.g., ‘We know what gender is!’) and doubt (e.g., ‘Should a Gender Studies course deviate from the well-recognised registers of violence and bias? Would that not mean shifting the focus away from “real” problems that women face?’).
While I teach in a Centre for Women’s Studies (CWS), the programme offered by the Centre is titled Gender Studies. This signals a move to locate the woman/gender question in contingent contexts, premised on the contemporary understanding of gender as a relational category, shaped through its relationship with a range of other social and cultural contexts such as caste and community. It also signals an attempt to recognise and draw into the curriculum issues pertaining to sexuality (outside the heteronormative binary) and queer identity/politics. 4 In the following section, I narrate the experience of teaching Gender Studies to students at the undergraduate level, a group just out of Class 12.
I
I must confess that teaching Gender Studies at the undergraduate level was akin to getting into uncharted waters for me. The CWS, which has been offering courses at the research level since 2008, ventured into this initiative in 2013. The key factors that led the Centre to this decision were: the mandate to introduce specialised Women’s Studies courses at all levels and the hope that a course in Gender Studies in the existing undergraduate programme of the university might be critical for a group of young students, facilitating a more sensitive engagement with worlds they inhabit. Moreover, we were encouraged by the official interest within the university to have Gender Studies in the programme as also by the enthusiasm shown by student groups. Student representatives from senior batches of the programme often voiced a need for Gender Studies at the undergraduate level. They were concerned about what they perceived as the psychological isolation and bewilderment that students faced upon entering a large university setting at a fairly young age. The spatial/institutional positioning of this programme might help us contextualise these concerns.
The undergraduate programme, housed in the Centre for Integrated Studies (CIS), 5 is located almost 3 km away from the main part of the university where the schools and centres of the humanities, social sciences and sciences are housed, resulting in a certain amount of isolation/alienation for the students studying there. Additionally, the fact that CIS does not have cultural events such as fiestas and competitions that are sites for socialisation and entertainment, only adds to their marginalisation. The subjects on offer are taught by either the regular faculty or by temporary teachers (known as ‘guest faculty’) appointed by the main departments/centres. This has a significant consequence: the instructors mostly take the classes assigned to them and are usually not available for after-class interactions with students.
As guest faculty I had taught Comparative Literature and English Language at the CIS between 2009 and 2010 and gender was a strong and prominent component in the courses designed by me. These were large classes with students from diverse social backgrounds, several of them vocal and invested in issues of caste and gender. After joining the CWS as regular faculty, I stopped teaching in the undergraduate programme but my erstwhile students, now in their senior years, continued to reiterate that Gender Studies at the CIS could provide a space for engaging with the problems faced by very young students. I sensed that these problems were linked to insecurities stemming from academic pressures as also sexuality, caste and psychological issues.
While I was touched by the faith in Gender Studies and its interventionist possibilities, I was apprehensive because these expectations seemed to exceed my academic responsibilities and capabilities. However, when the Centre eventually decided to offer Gender Studies at the undergraduate level during 2012, I opted to teach this course. In a well-meaning way, and perhaps keeping in mind the objective to introduce Gender Studies in all disciplines, the authorities at the CIS decided that it would be an option for students across the humanities, social sciences and sciences. In my interaction with the administration concerned, it appeared that this move was also guided by a conflation of the academic subject of Gender Studies with a gender sensitisation programme that could promote gender equality and ‘respect’ for women. This obviously is a reductionist interpretation of the ‘need for Gender Studies at all levels’ and, paradoxically, might have contributed to its significance as well as marginalisation within the programme.
I shared the course with a teaching assistant—a student-friendly, committed, well-read PhD scholar from Women’s Studies. Once we started, we observed that a majority of the students shared the official expectation that the course would be a gender sensitisation programme where the woman teacher 6 would speak about the atrocities against women and the need to treat them as equals. 7 This led us to some conclusions about the way 12 years of school education had shaped their idea of gender. At best it was reformist, at worst patronising. Manjrekar (2003) has discussed how feminist engagements with the politics of knowledge have largely bypassed school education which continued to offer a ‘narrow range of subject positions for girls and women, locating and even objectifying them as mere instruments in the narrative of national progress’ (p. 4577). Irrespective of the guidelines of the National Policy on Education (NPE) of 1986 which emphasised the necessity of re-orienting education to promote a gender perspective, school education has remained marginal to knowledge-building within the women’s movement and Women’s Studies (Manjrekar, 2003, p. 4578).
It was not surprising then that most of the freshly-out-of-school students in my class had no prior exposure to the concept of gender as a critical category or to the history of the women’s movement. This, combined with the exuberance and irreverence of a class consisting of 18/19-year-olds, posed some difficult challenges for me and the young teaching assistant. What made matters more complicated was the status of Gender Studies as an optional subject (worse, as an ‘additional’ subject for those who opted for it out of interest, over and above their mandatory subjects). The students were conscious of the importance of their ‘compulsory’ subjects—economics, political science, history or the sciences; they hoped to major in one of those subjects. The position of Gender Studies also got reflected in a very ‘routine’ phenomenon—the timetable where the class was allotted the 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. slot in the afternoon. As a result, the work for the teachers of Gender Studies began when the corridors were pretty much empty and one needed to ‘perform’ extra hard to hold the attention of the students. As John (2008a) points out, the mandate for Women’s Studies to be a critical perspective across disciplines runs into very real difficulties when faced with the entrenched hierarchy of disciplines within a university, pushing it back into a marginal status. In my particular context, despite the institutional eagerness to have Gender Studies in the undergraduate programme, concrete conditions signalled its insignificance.
Initially, about 12 students opted for the subject and almost 40 per cent of them were boys. The girls appreciated the presence of their male classmates; they believed it was important for a dialogue on gender issues. I sensed that most girls, despite the absence of complex engagement with gender in school, were more invested in the subject. They had faced different degrees of discrimination and sexual harassment, and looked forward to a space where a serious discussion and analysis of their experiences could take place. Several boys, on the other hand, strongly believed that the class only called for ‘common sense’ and informal exchange. This led me to re-assess my pedagogic strategies. My initial plan was to begin with discussions around short poems and news articles or film clips that contested stereotypes and assumptions rather than with more text-based academic readings. These could be followed by certain critical and introductory pieces along the lines of Gender (Geetha, 2002) or Patriarchy (Geetha, 2007). In short, a more interactive approach would lead to lengthier critical texts. I felt that short texts like Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ 8 or Suniti Namjoshi’s fables 9 along with short films, advertisements and news articles would resonate with the everyday social/visual experiences of young people. This approach was also motivated by a real concern that lengthy English texts might exclude students from regional-medium schools.
This strategy succeeded in some meaningful ways—most importantly, my student—colleague and I could draw out the quieter and more hesitant students. However, at another level, we experienced a definite pressure to be taken seriously as teachers of Gender Studies, specifically as we were ourselves women. This was curious because I never had a similar feeling while teaching ‘gender’ as part of Comparative Literature and English in the same venue before. In fact, breaking free from the printed text and engaging the experiential and everyday aspects of power had appealed to the students. Ironically, the same approach did not appear to work equally well in a Gender Studies course, despite the centrality of ‘experience’ in feminist thinking.
I have tried to think about the reasons for this ‘failure.’ I would partially ascribe it to the comparatively affluent background of a majority of the students who opted for Gender Studies but also the shared (if subliminal) perception that it was a subject that did not merit the rigours of academic pursuit. In contrast, in the larger English Language/Comparative Literature classes, many students were from Dalit and other marginalised backgrounds, who appreciated a pedagogic approach that moved between text and the world, actively seeking the politics that could emerge from [their] experience. Some of these students brought a remarkable degree of political literacy to the class; they were familiar with Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste as also with Che Guevara. They also took a great deal of interest in public discussions around caste and other discriminatory practices. 10
On the other hand, most of the students who had opted for a more specialised Gender Studies course perhaps lacked a similar everyday, embedded notion of power. Obviously, the school itself, with its twin emphases on nationalist ideology and information-based knowledge had done nothing to foster a critical understanding of social and political inequalities. In such a context, lack of text-based teaching reinforced the pre-existing assumption that Gender Studies was primarily informal—it only called for a generalised indictment of tradition or patriarchy as the source of women’s oppression. This was the case especially with the boys, who were frequently disinterested, displaying an attitude that said, ‘This does not happen to me anyway.’ But, more disturbing, when they did speak in the class, they reiterated attitudes that are clearly patriarchal and patronising—‘The women in my family are very submissive. I keep asking them to be stronger. Who can help them if they themselves want to be like that?’
Feminist method and pedagogy are premised upon creating a space for speaking out and sharing experience. Chaudhuri (2002) writes about the Women’s Studies classroom: ‘The classroom offered such a space to speak about the hitherto unspoken’ (p. 255). Second wave feminism in the West had emphasised the need for women to share experience, and to the naming of the ‘problem with no name’. The women’s movement inaugurated a fundamental shift in thinking about the women’s question—‘from women as subjects to be educated to “women” as new subjects of investigation and study’ (John, 2008a, p. 4). This led to a disruption of official narratives and a recovery of the voices and experiences of marginalised women. In recent years, several feminists, particularly from such backgrounds, have drawn attention to the historical specificities of Dalit women’s experience and marked its ‘difference’ from biographies of upper-caste, middle-class women, centred on individual struggles for liberation (see Rege, 2013). At the same time, a teacher of Gender Studies must remain alert to the risks of experience-oriented pedagogy. In a setting where several students share the assumption that gender is a matter of commonsense, ‘experience’ may be used as the basis for re-asserting patriarchal/parochial ‘truths’. An instructor may allow the caste, class and other underlying dimensions of such ‘experiential truths’ to emerge through steering discussion, but this at times leads to endless personalised exchanges (between the teacher and the student, or between boys and girls) or tense silences. I discuss below the re-organisation of teaching strategies that my colleague and I decided to undertake based on these perceptions.
Deviating from a more ‘informal’ approach, we handed out photocopied articles each week to be read before the next class. These were short and fairly accessible texts/excerpts discussing a range of concepts such as patriarchy, family, representation, body, women’s history, women’s movement and so on. 11 Students seemed to recognise the ‘validity’ and ‘legitimacy’ of printed material as they were used to it in their other classes as well as through their school years. More important for us, they suddenly discovered that a great deal of rigour and research went into theorising gender. For our part, while it gave us some credibility, the challenge now was to ensure that the text did not become the ‘last word’ but acted as a catalyst for students to think about their beliefs, assumptions and experiences in a more reflective mode. We soon noticed that about four to five boys who had opted for Gender Studies as an additional subject, dropped out. Perhaps, it was just too much work leading to no ‘tangible’ returns or professional prospects. The number had dwindled to about 15 from an initial 20 by the end of the four-month semester. At the same time, I was struck by the number of women students who found the class worth their while, and approached me several times after class to find out what they needed to do to pursue a career in Gender Studies. I am also encouraged by the fact that one of the very few Dalit students in the class, a science student, though weighed down by the demands of his compulsory subjects, eagerly participated in discussions and insisted on submitting extra assignments on gender.
In the end, I feel this was a sobering and enriching lesson despite all the setbacks and inadequacies. As an instructor, I was pushed to engage with the question of ‘relevance’ precisely because the class posed certain difficult questions. This meant finding strategies to communicate the critical history and political scope of the subject in small but significant ways. It also meant finding a tiny foothold in the hierarchy of disciplines that students are initiated into soon after their entry into the university.
II
This section deals with the pressures at the research level with the institutionalisation of Women’s Studies in higher education. In a university marked by the hierarchy of departmental and school structures, Women’s/Gender Studies must reckon with the need to be placed, identified and evaluated in terms of the concrete output and data it generates with respect to societal gender disparities. This thrust is further propelled by the new professionalisation of the subject. Simply put, there is a push to have well-recognised approaches and methodologies firmly in place—in other words, to be more like the other social science disciplines. Since Women’s Studies emerged from a critique of existing disciplines, and as inter/trans-disciplinary, it is interesting to note this attempt to moor it to the protocols of a ‘proper’ discipline. This trend is much stronger at a stage well past the undergraduate level where Gender Studies is offered only as one course among many. Specialisation seems to urgently call out for disciplinary legitimacy.
I explore this pattern through underscoring certain pedagogic concerns that emerged while teaching Gender Studies to scholars pursuing MPhils and PhDs in the subject. Once again, my views are context specific but will hopefully throw up certain more generalisable questions. I had mentioned earlier that the students in a research-level classroom are by and large a disciplined lot. However, this apparent calm can be misleading; the class offers some tough challenges. The students come from different academic disciplines—mainly from the social sciences and humanities. Teaching Gender Studies to them entails engaging with different subjects and the manner in which gender is addressed in these areas. For the past 3 years, I have been teaching a course titled ‘Gender Studies: Concepts and Contexts’, offered as a compulsory subject to research students. The course deals with a set of critical concepts in the subject, and their political and discursive implications. My methodological thrust has been to move away from definitions/descriptions and bring out the situated and contingent character of gender. A cluster of readings, for instance, mapped how gendered practices (mothering, work, body) are shaped by caste, race or community. Similarly, another set of readings dealt with questions such as sexuality, masculinity, representation and so on. Although the focus of this course is on India; each year I include readings from non-white/non-Western contexts with the intent to open out the horizon beyond the hegemonic western feminist texts that students are familiar with. 12
Perhaps because of my own background and the fact that my course has a fair number of readings dealing with media, representation, biographical accounts and so on, I noticed that students from English Literature fit in more easily than those from the various disciplines of the social sciences. I am conscious of this ‘tilt’ and have, over the past years, increasingly prescribed texts by feminist economists, historians and a range of social scientists in general. I do believe these inclusions have yielded an interesting balance in the course. While Partha Chatterjee’s seminal ‘The Nationalist Resolution to the Women’s Question’ (1989) or Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) may be received as too abstract and as more in sync with the humanities by many students, an article by Nirmala Bannerjee or Bina Agarwal draws enthusiastic participation—often those from non-literature backgrounds taking the lead.
It is indeed important that an instructor makes her course responsive to the differential skills and backgrounds of students. Each year I worry whether a text is accessible to the maximum number of students in a class. 13 If a majority of students find the theoretical register of a text too intimidating, then the teacher, despite her radical intent, risks becoming what Sharmila Rege calls the ‘saviour’ or the sole interlocutor of ‘truth’, thereby re-enforcing ‘the canonical compulsions that exist at the heart of all pedagogy’ (2010, p. 95). It helps to set up small extracts from a difficult and erudite text like Gender Trouble alongside more locally engaged discussions in a range of texts such as newspapers, ethnographic analysis and autobiographies that complicate gender norms and the stable notion of sexuality.
This approach, even as it introduces students to an influential text in the field, attempts not to make it canonical. Second, analytical texts, life stories and contemporary events are set up in a dialogic mode, encouraging students to come up with responses embedded in their own experience. During our discussions on sexuality, a student actively involved in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement of Hyderabad was led to reflect on the fissures between the LGBT and hijra communities in the city along the lines of class and caste; he himself had been disparagingly called ‘Englishpur ki Kothi’ 14 on occasion. I believe that the class offered a space for subterranean tensions to surface, further fracturing the concept of (alternative) sexuality.
As obvious in the instance above, concepts continually spilled into one another—foreclosing compartmentalised engagement with caste, community, gender, sexuality and so on. This is in tune with the goals of the course; however, student responses have been complex and varied. The disciplinary training of students often prepared them to look for basic concepts and definitions—in other words, a prior foundation upon which critique could be built subsequently. Several students come with the expectation of receiving a definitional and descriptive understanding of concepts such as gender, patriarchy or sexual division of labour— topics that frequently form the staple of Women’s Studies courses. At certain moments, I sense their bewilderment and frustration in my class. The question of canon emerges as an important pedagogic question as I struggle to re-vision the course; the canon cannot simply be dismissed but needs to be placed in an oppositional relationship with the non-canonical. Rege has insightfully dealt with similar difficulties in introducing a critical Phule-Ambedkarite feminist pedagogy in the class:
[D]o we as teachers of particular disciplines have responsibility and accountability to the canon—so to say initiate the students into the discipline? When is the ‘right time’ at which critique can be introduced? In other words are we saying that in introducing students to the discourse of caste ‘canon’ must be taught before the critical perspectives of Phule, Ambedkar and more contemporary dalit-Bahujan-feminist critiques of the discourse are introduced? … the canon to be deauthorized and demystified must be seen relationally, so that the canonical and the non-canonical emerge in oppositional confrontation in specific historical conjunctures. (2010, pp. 94–95)
The acceptance or rejection of a text/approach by students coming from diverse disciplinary trainings may be further located in the larger methodological gulf between literature/humanities and the social sciences. A reading that deals with empirical details speaks to the non-humanities students. Those from a literature background are used to more theoretical readings but sometimes express their admiration for those classmates from the social sciences trained in field research. However, I would like to foreground the more general resistance in the Gender Studies classroom to texts which stress the normative and the discursive through/beyond the empirical and the evident. I deal with questions that may not be bluntly asked but nevertheless lurk unsaid in the background: ‘A reading that deals with culture and norms may be interesting but would it help us to deal with real issues faced by women?’ ‘Could these discussions be carried into field research for topics concerning domestic violence, women’s health, or financial inclusion of rural women?’ I think these are important questions that a teacher of Gender Studies needs to grapple with.
As several feminist scholars have pointed out, distanced from the immediate contexts of the women’s movement in India, students often treat women’s subjugation as self-evident and universal. I note with some disquiet that a large number of students, even those with an MA in Women’s Studies, are not aware of the foundational texts that engage with the issues that animated the women’s movement in India including Towards Equality, the report of Committee on the Status of Women in India (1974). This pattern may be read within the context of the reframing of the goals of a large number of University Grants Commission-sponsored centres of Women’s Studies since the mid-1990s in accordance with governmental/internationalist discourse of ‘empowerment’ (see Anandhi and Swaminathan, 2006). Interestingly, the 1990s are also the years when several significant events—the upper caste agitations against the implementation of the Mandal Commission report, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the assertion of Dalit feminist voices—pushed feminist scholars to interrogate the presumed universality of the feminist subject (see Tharu and Niranjana, 1996).
However, these questions do not appear to have infiltrated the institutional sites of Women’s Studies; as Rege notes, there may be a serious disjunct between Women’s Studies as an intellectual–political project and the institutional expansion of Women’s Studies in higher education (2011, p. 5). In my experience, students frequently approach the subject with firm pre-given notions about what ‘woman’ or ‘Women’s Studies’ is. While discussing sexual violence, student responses reflect universalist–reformist assumptions—‘Rape is barbaric’ or ‘Men who commit rape are animals.’ This may be attributed to the banality and over-familiarity of the trope of violence within the discourse, divorced from historical specificities. It is only once in a while that one hears a voice that links rape with caste or the politics of visibility; a Dalit woman student once asked why the continuous sexual violence against women of her community found so little coverage in media. The ‘pre-known’ character of violence is entrenched such that when students are faced with a text that meticulously links the ‘event’ of sexual violence to institutional contexts and local power relationships they may find it overtly intellectual. 15 Chaudhuri (2002) captures a similar predicament in the Gender Studies class: ‘My interlocutors [in class] rarely felt the need to pay attention to specific topic being addressed. It was about “women”, “women’s studies” and feminism, and this was enough to entitle them to speak with legitimacy about men and women’ (p. 256). I detect a shift in classroom dynamics each time a student questions disciplinary commonplaces from within lived experiences of marginalisation (such as the Dalit student I mentioned above). But, largely, one witnesses an embedded faith in the universal–modernist promise of Gender/Women’s Studies/feminism. It is early for me to mark this as a trend but I do notice that students who are active in political movements and student politics on campus do not opt for Women’s/Gender Studies as a specialisation. This is partly because more established disciplines such as sociology, political science or English literature are seen as opening out wider opportunities. But I also sense a deeper and more troubling reason: Women’s Studies is too closely associated either with a brand of ‘liberated’ urban feminism or with the plight of poor, suffering women. Consequently, it is seen as a field that offers only limited scope for political and academic inquiry. Perhaps the current institutionalisation of the discourse combined with the proliferation of research on topics such as domestic violence, trafficking of women or the girl child has contributed to such a perception. At the Centre we recognise the necessity to break with such stereotyping and reach out to a more diverse student community through academic initiatives, collaborations, seminars and other interventions that signal a broader investment.
This article has engaged with the complexities of teaching Gender Studies in two different classrooms—at the undergraduate and the research levels. At the undergraduate level, I encountered what may be termed a ‘disciplinary innocence’—a majority of the students came with the view that Gender Studies was unlike other academic subjects and was merely aimed at bringing about attitudinal changes. As a teacher of Women’s/Gender Studies, I needed to take into account the modes in which gender/women figured over years of schooling. During this crucial pedagogic phase, students largely encounter women as icons (Rani of Jhansi) or as additions to the list of male nationalists/reformers, or as mothers (in civics or language textbooks). Students were also trained to privilege a text-centred approach. While I began with a more informal approach, I subsequently perceived the need to work with this training to communicate the significance and rigours of Gender Studies as an academic subject. I would like to underscore that in choosing the material, the content was as important as the level of difficulty of English. Looking back on my search to find the right texts, I believe that a well thought out textbook on Women’s Studies may prove to be a useful resource for the undergraduate teacher.
In comparison with the undergraduate class, the research classroom perhaps provides a comfort zone: the students are more disciplined and bring to the class a certain amount of decorum and academic seriousness, cultivated through their exposure to the regimen of higher education. However, deeper fault lines soon emerge. The disciplinary training of students frequently prepares them to treat ‘gender’ as an isolatable category, added on to the existing apparatus of knowledge. Moreover, there is a general impression that specialisation in Gender Studies means writing a thesis on ‘women’s issues’, premised on the hypothesis that greater access to government schemes or the benefits of globalisation is a panacea for gender discrimination in all forms. Such an orientation can be placed in the context of the two distinct trends that have emerged since the 1990s. On the one hand, the politics of caste and sexuality have problematised the essentialist notion of ‘woman’ as the subject of feminist politics; on the other, within discourses of empowerment and development gender becomes a synonym for ‘woman’, disengaged from structural and historical inequalities. 16 The pedagogic challenge for the teacher of Gender Studies then is to re-connect with the multiple and political histories of Women’s Studies/movement as also with the contestations that animate our present.