South Asian Feminisms: Gender, Culture and Politics
An Interdisciplinary International Conference at the University of Pennsylvania
On March 28th and 29th, several dozen academics, activists, researchers and scholars gathered at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for a two-day conference entitled “South Asian Feminisms: Gender, Culture and Politicsâ€. Conceived with a regional focus for an international audience, the conference succeeded in bringing together a variety of viewpoints on a host of different issues such as activism, sex work, and the new fundamental politics in South Asia.
The organizers, Professors Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose, welcomed participants with an explication of the terms of the conference title, thinking about the intersections of gender, politics and culture in an area like South Asia, which often gets sidelined in global discussions but deserves detailed analysis.
The conference participants and attendees represented a number of diverse disciplines, ranging from history, English, and South Asian studies to public policy, law, and education. Yet it was easy to find common ground. During the very first paper, given by Flavia Agnes, a women’s-rights lawyer and co-founder of Majlis, a Mumbai-based legal resource center for women, audience members could be seen nodding at intervals, and murmuring their agreement with Agnes’ argument about the exceptionality of Muslim women in the Indian social and legal context.
Over the course of the afternoon, the discussion turned to the limits of feminist activism given circumstances like secularism, nationalism, and global political interests. As Amina Jamal (Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada), Dina Siddiqi (Consultant, Gender and Human Rights, Dhaka/New York), Angana Chatterji (California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA), Ratna Kapur (Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi), Vasuki Nesiah (Director, International Affairs, Brown University, Providence, RI), Malathi De Alwis (International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka), and Anannya Bhattacharjee (Jobs with Justice, India/USA) gave their papers, questions flew across the room, and the speakers were both challenged and lauded on their arguments and hypotheses.
The second day saw a new host of papers, this time centered on the range of attitudes and reactions to sex and sex work. Rimli Bhattacharya (University of Delhi), Anjali Arondekar (University of California, Santa Cruz), Laura Brueck (Hamilton College, Clinton, NY), Toorjo Ghose (School of Social Policy and Practice, University of Pennsylvania), Firdous Azim (BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh), and Ashwini Sukthankar (International Commission for Labor Rights, New York) engaged participants and their fellow panelists with their nuanced insights.
Finally, it was time for conference respondent Professor Mrinalini Sinha, who teaches at the Pennsylvania State University, to bring the discussion full circle. While summarizing the thematic connections between several of the papers given at the conference, Sinha discussed the difficulties inherent in thinking and writing about “South Asian feminismsâ€. She also suggested new ways in which to work within the topic area, using gender as a methodology, and thus sparked off a wide-ranging closing discussion and Q&A session among panelists and attendees.
Overall, the two-day meeting of minds spawned a number of interesting questions, connections and conversations. The organizers hope to publish a volume of the best essays, supplemented with discussion questions, in the relatively near future.
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