Indian feminism and its uncertain genealogies

The Centre for Indian Studies at Wits will host this seminar by V. Geetha.

For more than two decades Indian feminists have grappled with questions to do with a fractured feminist sisterhood, but through a conceptual lens that we have borrowed from the American context. We thus express our misgivings in terms of ‘intersectional feminism’, and even as we address questions arising from within recognisably Indian realities, of caste, ethnicity and region, we mostly reference conceptual work produced in a context that is quite distinct from ours. This mismatch is not unproductive, but it does not help us understand how, over the decades, we have engaged with ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ – this history is yet to be mapped out or narrated in ways that capture the idealism of our politics of sisterhood, the manner in which we engaged with questions to do with ‘difference’ and our founded oversights.

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