409 Barnard Hall
the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
A lecture by Tejaswini Niranjana, co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, Visiting Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of the Humanities at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
Moderated by Rosalind Morris, Columbia University.
About the Event
A heightened awareness about the need for ‘safety’ and of the violence of urban spaces is a key feature of discussions about women in 21st century India.
The discourse of harassment is central to a renewed sense of victimhood which leads feminist groups and policy-makers alike to propose ever more elaborate modes of protection. The opening up of opportunities for women and men in the post-liberalization period cuts across the class-caste spectrum, but this also seems to expand the opportunities for violent gendered interaction prompted by the idea of the ‘new woman’ unfettered by restrictions on her mobility or her clothing. The concern with violence and safety appears to have become the dominant response to neo-liberal globalization, even as the commodity fantasies of late capitalism fuel women’s experimentation with how they look and behave. In the clamour about safety, we lose the sense of how women and social transformation are being linked together, how the connections between culture and gender are being re-articulated, and how desire is being reorganised.
This presentation is based on recent research done in the southern city of Bangalore in which women drawn from four sectors – higher education, the information technology (IT) industry, organized politics and NGOs – were interviewed. The idea is to see how in the process of ‘becoming-woman’ in the age of globalization we can glimpse a larger landscape, where – as Deleuze and Guattari put it – “The individual concern … becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it”.
