Abstract
Greetings in the new year from IJGS! This issue looks at the woman’s body through the shifting discourses around rape and the human rights of sex workers. Other articles examine importance of gender in pedagogy as well as in sustainable development is analysed in some detail. In keeping with the increasing focus on visualisation, we introduce a Photo Essay curated by well-known historian Aparna Basu: as we move on after celebrations of our 70th year of Independence, it is only appropriate that IJGS should carry images that remind us of women’s role in the Gandhian movement. We hope to make the Photo Essay an annual feature and revive our Personal Narratives section with Sumi Krishna’s evocative memories of how she and a few others worked to create an archive for the Indian Association for Women’s Studies, moving out of steel cupboards to state-of-the-art digitisation.
Over the last couple of years, we have focused on four grey eminences of women’s studies and the movement—Vina Mazumdar, Leela Dube, Neera Desai and Lotika Sarkar. Earlier issues have carried contributions on Vina Mazumdar and Leela Dube and the next issue this year looks at Neera Desai’s early writings, her contributions to the establishment of the first Women’s Studies Research Centre and her unique form of activism. Articles on Lotika Sarkar’s contribution to law and gender anslyses will appear in 2019.
Apart from a melange of articles on the persistence of child marriage, the transgendered devotee, division of labour in rural society and so on, we are particularly happy to showcase our last issue for 2018 that will focus on the narratives of bodily functions such as women’s access to toilets, discussions around menstrual leave, the problems of open defecation and so on.
Before we end, we would like to thank our reviewers and contributors, and hope that they and many others will continue to support IJGS particularly with personal narratives, series of visual narratives—archival and contemporary—for Photo Essays and comments and communications, another new feature that we would like to include in IJGS soon enough. We would also like to thank the IJGS team—most of whom have been with us in our exciting journey of 25 years.