Indian Journal of Gender Studies

This article uses a feminist human rights approach and focusses on one of the most painful experiences in intimate relationships, unveiling a hitherto unexplored type of human rights infringement for divorced women, namely the right to establish a family in Israel, purported to be a democratic state. This phenomenon is based on religious marriage rules and prohibitions that include, inter alia, the classification of Jews into 10 hierarchical pedigrees, which are partially equivalent to Indian castes. Owing to this caste-like classification, thousands of couples are proscribed from marrying each other every year in Israel. This article focusses on couples that disobeyed the prohibitions on couples consisting of male Cohanim (descendants of Jewish priests) and divorced women, as one type of forbidden marriage. Four themes emerged from data analysis of narratives of 26 interviewees, which converge to a common motif of the liminality of Cohen-divorcee couples. The article argues that this liminality undermines the basic rationale of the prevailing millet (personal law) system and discusses the implications of this liminality for women’s human rights and religion-state relations.

Little is known about the frequency, severity and types of violence dalit women go through in higher education institutions in India. This article explores the lived experiences of dalit girls in a university in North India and elaborates their experiences of sexual harassment in their everyday social interactions on campus. This issue has been gaining more attention recently, but most studies focus on gender, not caste. How do dalit girls experience sexual harassment in ways that differ from harassment suffered by upper caste girls? This article focuses on the specificities of dalit girls’ experiences in a university which is controlled by the upper castes and dominant classes. It also highlights the ways in which dalit girls articulate and interpret sexual harassment, and the circumscribed ways in which they try to negotiate with their predicament while seeking higher education.

In feminist political ecological discourses, women are seen as potential initiators and actors in collective action. Gendered differential practices in sustaining certain forms of collective action within the community have remained under-researched. Women play a key role as providers of food, water, fuel and fodder. They have also gained access to alternative means of livelihood and formed groups to conserve forest resources. Women’s roles hold the potential to ensure their claim to inclusion in the development process.

This article formulates a set of interrelated questions to interrogate the role of community of practice (CoP) as an analytical framework to understand informal community action led by rural women. These questions concern the significance of collective action in relation to social structures, institutions and processes. Communities practise different kinds of sustainable and shared methods of collective action; for example, women’s collectives or self-help groups continuously work to create sustainable forms of collective action. We argue that the CoP framework provides an opportunity to explore the integral social basis of collective action, which cannot be understood without acknowledging women as important agents in shaping community initiatives.

The study explores the phenomenon of street harassment and its socio-psychological implications on women living in the capital city of Islamabad, Pakistan. Street harassment represents a form of gender violence that violates human dignity by making the female victims feel vulnerable and insecure in public spaces. The findings have been compiled on the basis of empirical analyses of the views of 200 female students from eight different universities of Islamabad, Pakistan. The study reveals that objectification, street harassment and abuse are incontrovertible parts of women’s lives in Pakistan. Despite constituting more than half of the population in the Pakistan, women continue to live in a patriarchal milieu that thrives on harassment, discrimination and oppression against them in both public and private spheres. The study concludes that the menace of street harassment entails devastating emotional, physical and psychological impacts and recommends that policy interventions be undertaken to curb this heinous act perpetrated against women.

This article identifies the ways in which researchers and practitioners situated in different institutions engage with different systems of knowledge in their study of gender in the context of development, and the implications it has on how these professionals work together. Key informant interviews with 25 gender specialists from universities, research organizations, NGOs, UN agencies and donors undertaken in Delhi, India, are used as an illustration. The study finds that researchers/practitioners perceive that they study gender in dissimilar ways based on differences in academic training, professional roles and explicit affiliation with feminism. In practice, however, they have adopted ‘pragmatic’ ways to bridge the epistemological divide between the perspectives of ‘gender and development’ and ‘feminism’. These pragmatic practices are visible in the ways in which they work with the government, academia and donor organizations. I voice their need to traverse the quantitative–qualitative divide in order to strengthen our understanding of gender. The study demonstrates that researchers can negotiate epistemological differences for the sake of achieving the common goal of gender justice. This is important as the field of research on gender expands globally, with the emergence of new sites of knowledge production and emphasis on numerical evidence.

Across Indian metropolises, large demonstrations protesting violence against women have become very frequent, marking the present as a significant moment for feminism. I use the term feminism metonymically, to signify the force activated in the name of justice, when women foreground their gender identity. This clarification is prompted by the resistance to these terms seen as Western, culturally different from the milieu here constituted by an active meld of economic and socio-political features. However, in the immense heterogeneity of the cities, markers such as region, caste, religion, etc, get marginalized, though definitely not erased.

Impediments to any neat, progressive reading of the public assertions are many. Gender gets displaced when other contexts, which have produced us as women through differentiations, come into play unexpectedly. Breaking the hegemony of cultural imaginaries remains a work in process.

Sayani Mitra, Silke Schicktanz, and Tulsi Patel (Eds.), Cross–Cultural Comparisons on Surrogacy and Egg Donation: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives from India, Germany and Israel. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, Hardcover, 399 pages, 129,99 €, ISBN: 978-3-319-78670-4.

M. S. Sreerekha. State without Honour: Women Workers in India’s Anganwadis. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017, 348 pages, ₹950. ISBN: 9780199468164.

Sahgal Smita, Niyoga: Alternative Mechanism to Lineage Perpetuation in Early India: A Socio-Historical Enquiry. Delhi: Primus Books-ICHR, 2017, 242 pages, ₹995. ISBN: 978-93-84082-85-7.

Mohammad A. Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan (Eds.), A Feminist Foremother: Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2017, 285 pages, ₹875. ISBN 978-93-86296-00-9.

Ruby Lal, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2018, 308 pages, ₹599. ISBN: 9780670090624.

Jasodhara Bagchi, Interrogating Motherhood. New Delhi: SAGE/Stree, 2017, 140 pages, ₹345. ISBN: 9789381345177.