Indian Journal of Gender Studies

In this article, I discuss women’s perceptions of and experiences with self-help groups and collective action in two agricultural communities in Tamil Nadu, India. Focusing on women’s social and political activities, particularly in terms of the struggle for the approval and construction of a new road, I argue that in these communities, self-help groups offered a conceptual space that encouraged collective actions, and contributed to processes of change in the ways women perceived and experienced their personal power and their social positions within their households and communities. I demonstrate how these groups offered a way for members to add their voices to political struggles and articulate their visions of the future, even as they recognised everyday gender inequities.

A growing body of research has documented that spousal violence has several adverse effects on the reproductive health of women. Using the dataset of the third National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) conducted in India in 2005–2006, the present study tries to find out the relationship between spousal violence and the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among women. How prevailing gender norms act as underlying factors of women’s risk of STI has been discussed in this paper. Overall, 9.6 per cent women in India reported an STI/STI symptom in the year preceding the survey. After covariate adjustment it was found that, compared to the women who did not experience violence in 12 months before the survey, the chances of having an STI/STI symptom was twice higher for those who experienced only physical violence and three times higher for those who experienced both physical and sexual violence during that period. The findings of this study suggest that prevention of marital violence should be incorporated in the programmes that aim to reduce STIs among women.

This article seeks to explore the stories that women’s studies in India tells about itself—its beginnings, trajectories and situations in the contemporary. Deploying the term ‘feminist storytelling’, the article focuses particularly on the origin stories that it diligently narrates. Feminist storytelling is to be understood here as a certain account-taking, a certain history-telling. It necessarily entails that we choose from a multitude of details; that we select and omit. It means that we plot different elements in terms of causality, sequence, consequence that we frame a beginning, middle and culmination. In other words, storytelling demands that we configure and construct—a temporal range, definite perspectives, priorities, order, conflicts, tempo, significations and resolutions.

This article zeroes in on two stories that are repeatedly called upon to mark the beginnings of women’s studies: (i) the long fertile 19th century with its clamour over the ‘women’s question’ and (ii) the tumultuous decade of the 1970s which witnessed twinned events—the publication of the Towards Equality report and the emergence of the autonomous women’s movement. The particular manner in which women’s studies claim these histories, the article argues, mediates present dispositions and the modes by which women’s studies orients itself in the world. It conditions the responses we formulate under the sign of gender and in the name of woman. After analysing a few key renderings of ‘feminist storytelling’, this article quickly sketches a cartography of impasses confronting contemporary women’s studies. Several of these, it proposes, can be traced back to the origin stories propounded by feminist storytelling.

Zarina Bhatty, Purdah to Piccadilly. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2016

Sarah Hodges and Mohan Rao (Eds), Public Wealth and Private Wealth: Stem Cells, Surrogates and Other Strategic Bodies. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. 283 pages. ₹850, ISBN 13: 978-0-19-946337-4.