Indian Journal of Gender Studies

Electronic music is often presented as originating with the Futurists, John Cage, Robert Moog, Kraftwerk and the Detroit techno scene, yet such descriptions elide the role of women in the history of electronic and experimental music and, importantly, occlude contributions from non-western and non-white musicians. This clandestine history is further obscured by the fact that although there are as many women artists working within electronic and experimental music as there are men, men continue to dominate related events and festivals. In this article, I use Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology—a portmanteau of ‘haunting’ and ‘ontology’—to frame such practices of historiography. For Derrida, hauntology marks not a belief in ghosts but, rather, an ethical injunction to preserve otherness, even while such otherness may not be wholly comprehensible to us. The aim of this article is thus twofold: first, to provide a contextualisation of hauntology; and second, to produce a spectrography of electronic and experimental music, of occluded histories and their haunting presence/absence coordinates, in order that we might remember—sit with—the forgotten h(er)istories while all the time acknowledging that these tellings are themselves necessarily partial.

In 2013, Sharmila Tagore¹ called Bollywood ‘[n]o country for old women’.¹ Like all older women, aging female actors of Bollywood too have experienced what Susan Sontag calls ‘the double standard of aging’: at older ages women are viewed as being too old to play central figures unlike men who play lead roles for a longer time. Aging reduces women’s suitability as ‘heroines’ in the film industry. The article (a) provides a critical genealogy of female aging in the world of Indian cinema, which was born in the colonial era and (b) assesses the representation of older women in more recent Bollywood movies.

This article explores the role of reserved-seat women members of the Union Parishad, the lowest unit of local government in Bangladesh. The number of women representatives has increased manifold over the years, most of whom are elected from reserved seats. Formally, a reserved-seat member has a larger constituency than a general seat member; and enjoys almost similar powers and responsibilities. In practice, there remains a major gap between what the rules say and what transpires on the ground. Notwithstanding their increased presence, women elected from reserved seats to the Union Parishad, often find it difficult to make their presence felt and are ignored, especially by their male colleagues, for several reasons. This article identifies those reasons and argues that women’s increased presence is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of empowerment. Legitimacy gained through winning elections in a competitive process and the willingness of the elected women to get things done in an adversarial situation can be considered important steps towards empowerment. Nonetheless, more is needed, especially organised support from outside, to enhance empowerment and make it sustainable.

The study attempts to locate female transgressions against a racist and homophobic society as portrayed by Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor in their novels Loving Her (1974), The Color Purple (1982) and The Women of Brewster Place (1983), respectively. It applies the content-analysis method, lesbian feminist theory and intersectionality to explore the black women characters’ defiance of hetero-patriarchal culture. The novelists effectively challenge heterosexism, and advocate women’s solidarity and lesbian sexuality as acts of resistance to regulative sexual norms. The theoretical tools compare and analyse how different categorisations of race and sex are interwoven in the novels and how their intersection hinders lesbian relations and women’s solidarity. The commonality of the black lesbian characters lies in their experience of sexualised aggression as well as racial otherness. Walker’s characters, unlike Shockley’s and Naylor’s, powerfully threaten sexist, racist and homophobic society and promote universal sisterhood.

From the mid-19th century the existence of a large number of native prostitutes in the British military cantonments confirmed the widespread prevalence of state-authorised prostitution in colonial India. The colonial administration induced new laws that tried to restrict prostitution as a practice exclusively for the service of the British military men and also made it a sanctioned part of the military establishment. Consequently, a new form of regulated military prostitution evolved that radically changed the nature of prostitution as it used to be in the pre-colonial period.

In this article, I have tried to explore the causes behind the emergence of regulated military prostitution and how it was implemented and systematised in British India. It would also focus on a new pattern of brothel life which emerged throughout military cantonments and finally the women’s life in cantonments that would provide a glimpse of their daily chores and challenges.

Introduction to the Book Forum on Ishita Pande’s Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937