Srila Roy

Bio: Srila Roy is an academic researcher from University of the Witwatersrand. The author has contributed to research in topics: Feminism & Gender studies. The author has an hindex of 13, co-authored 22 publications receiving 439 citations. Previous affiliations of Srila Roy include University of Warwick & University of Nottingham.

The Indian Women’s Movement Within and Beyond NGOization

Abstract: The article documents some of the transformations to the women’s movement in India in the post-independence period. Given the empirical and ideological centrality of nongovernmental organisations (...

Melancholic politics and the politics of melancholia: The Indian women’s movement

Abstract: Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional p...

Politics, Passion and Professionalization in Contemporary Indian Feminism:

Abstract: The article locates itself in current criticisms of the ‘NGOization’ and professionalization of women’s movements in India. It is concerned with the critique of the instrumentalization of feminism in its ‘9 to 5ization’ together with the rise of a phenomenon that is disparagingly referred to, in generational terms, as the ‘career feminist’. In considering two distinct forms of activism and organizational cultures, the article troubles the dichotomy between ‘passion’ and ‘profession’ in terms of which feminist activism and identities have come to be understood in India today, in an era of neoliberal development. It uncovers points of convergence and hybridity in contemporary feminist practice.

The positive side of co-optation? Intersectionality: a conversation between Inderpal Grewal and Srila Roy

Abstract: If co-optation is a loss of feminism – about a feminist subject or strategy within a social movement that has moved to other movements and institutions not thought of as feminist – then we have to ...

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

Abstract: WOMEN Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004 xvi + 199 pages Gloss, to p 203 Refs to p 223 Index to p 233 $55 cloth; $1795 paper This book explores "the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt" (p 2) However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997) She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come "to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding the certainty of my own political commitments, when trying to understand the lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments" (p xi) By refusing to take her own political stance as the necessary lens through which the analysis proceeds, the author opens up the possibility that "my analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided the bedrock of my personal existence" (p xii) It is necessary, the author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not to assume that the political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide the ground for our theoretical analysis As readers, we are invited to join her in "parochializing our assumptions, about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of the political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as the women's mosque movement" (p 38) It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book The five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come to inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as the women's mosque movement, are analyzed Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable "The Subject of Freedom" illustrates the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement challenges the liberal conception of politics Mahmood analyzes the conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this non-liberal movement in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status "Topography of the Piety Movement" provides a brief sketch of the historical development against which the contemporary mosque movement has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements We sense the broad-based character of the women's mosque movement through the author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork Despite the differences among the mosque groups - ranging from the poorest to the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for the increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate the increasing respect accorded to the da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in the 20th century came to be associated with proselytization activity) "Women and the Da'wa" (pp 64-72) is particularly insightful, as the author juxtaposes the emergence of secular liberalism with the da'wa movement and concludes that "the modernist project of the regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges …

Europe and the People without History

Abstract: The intention of this work is to show that European expansion not only transformed the historical trajectory of non-European societies but also reconstituted the historical accounts of these societies before European intervention. It asserts that anthropology must pay more attention to history.

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics