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

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

Introduction l Reform in the nineteenth century: efforts to modernize women's roles 2 Education for women 3 The emergence of women's organizations 4 The movement for women's rights 5 Women in the nationalist movement 6 Women's work in colonial India 7 A time of transition 8 Women in independent India Bibliographic essay

Women in Modern India

▪ Abstract Sociology has paid insufficient attention to third world women's movements. In this review, for which we draw upon a variety of interdisciplinary sources, we focus on three questions: the issue of women's interests; the conditions under which women mobilize—particularly the effects of democratization, nationalist, religious, and socialist movements; and the issue of state and organizational autonomy. We argue that the concept of a political opportunity structure inadequately captures the role that states in the third world play in determining the possibilities of third world women's movements. We call for more comparative work with a focus on the local rather than on the macro level. This will help us to better understand both the ways in which women's collective identities and interests are constructed and the ideological and material conditions under which mobilizations actually take place.

WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS IN THE THIRD WORLD: Identity, Mobilization, and Autonomy

1. Political India 2. The Political Arithmetic of the Presidencies 3. The Rewards of Education 4. The Policies of the Rulers 5. The Politics of the Associations 6. The Politics of Union 7. The Muslim Breakaway 8. Perspectives.

The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century.

The ubiquity of the European social club in the European empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been widely recognized in both popular and academic writings on European, and particularly British, imperialism The “European” ascription of imperial social clubs derived from their predominantly whites-only membership policy in which all elite Europeans, whatever their nationalities, were potentially included Although each individual club often catered to a very different and distinctive clientele among elite Europeans in the empire, the “clubland” as a whole served as a common ground where elite Europeans could meet as members, or as guests of members, of individual clubs These clubs, it has been argued, represented an oasis of European culture in the colonies, functioning to reproduce the comfort and familiarity of “home” for Europeans living in an alien land The popular narrative of the club, as is evident from the account by the official historian of the Bengal Club, one of the oldest social clubs in India, easily oscillated between an understanding of the club as a broadly European cultural institution and as a specifically British one Either way, the cultural values that it represented were understood as transplanted to the colonies: “It is the practice of European peoples to reproduce as far as possible in their settlements and colonies in other continents the characteristic social features of their natural lives … For more than a century no institution has been more peculiarly British than the social club”

Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India

critical exercise that simultaneously interrogated problems of power within indigenous custom and tradition (especially their gender norms, albeit within definite patriarchal limits), as well as within the colonial connection. The problems so interanimated and complicated one another that far from reaching a resolution, it was unable to set itself an agenda with any absolute certainty. Emergent nationalist consciousness, which straddled a complex range of forms and possibilities, posed more questions and doubts to its own convictions than resolutions. ’

The Hindu wife and the Hindu nation: Domesticity and nationalism in nineteenth century Bengal

The essay identifies previously unnoticed signposts charting the construction of women in nineteenth-century Bengal as autonomous, self-possessed persons, with entitlements to an intellectual life and immunities against physical and sexual death. Out of these claims, the notion of the female citizen would emerge as a coherent and convincing possibility in the next century. This essay focuses on three pieces of colonial legislation, on specific court cases and social reform movements, and finally, on women's self-narrativisation against these developments. Laws resonant in the emergent public sphere weakened the absolute authority of norms, while the multivocal public sphere interrogated the jurisdiction of colonial laws. Thus, neither norms nor laws could claim the hegemony that earlier religious prescriptions had possessed because of the symbiosis between legality and morality. This breakdown of the hegemony of religious precepts and laws thus created a space for women's self-creation as autonomous subjects.

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Enfranchised selves: women, culture and rights in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Educating the Children of the Hindu Rashtra: Notes on RSS Schools

Acknowledgements: This is the first essay from a larger work in progress on law, family, religion and nationalism in late colonial Bengal. The essay, however, is still being broadened out. I am grateful for comments and criticisms on earlier drafts by Radhika Singha, Ravi Vasudevan, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Ratnabali Chatterjee and Sumit Sarkar. An earlier version of the paper was presented at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in a seminar in November 1994. I

Talking about Scandals: Religion, Law and Love in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal:

This article focuses on ‘Love Jihad,’ the neologism that Hindutva, or Hindu Extremism, has invented to incite suspicion and violence against Indian Muslims. I begin with a brief discussion of several characteristics of the Hindutva organisational and ideological apparatus. Then I discuss anti-Love Jihad campaigns as a strategy to assert Hindu extremism in interpersonal relations. I go on to highlight specific episodes of ‘Love Jihad’ attacks by the Hindu Right that have targeted and made a political spectacle of love and marriage across community boundaries. I suggest that Love Jihad campaigns become a mode of producing docile, submissive subjects who will not question regimes of power, be it neoliberalism, religious majoritarianism or social hierarchies and injustice.

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Tanika Sarkar

Papers

The Hindu wife and the Hindu nation: Domesticity and nationalism in nineteenth century Bengal

Enfranchised selves: women, culture and rights in nineteenth-century Bengal.

Educating the Children of the Hindu Rashtra: Notes on RSS Schools

Talking about Scandals: Religion, Law and Love in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal:

Special Guest Contribution: Is Love without Borders Possible?: