Hecklers to Power? The Waning of Liberal Rights and Challenges to Feminism in South Asia
in Ania Loomba and Ritty Lukose, eds., South Asian Feminisms 333-355 (Duke University Press) 2012
Posted: 19 Jun 2013
Date Written: 2012
Abstract
Feminism and feminist activism in India are going through turbulent times. There is a spirit of political despair as promise of revolution fades and feminism faces challenges from within and without. Feminism’s dream, to make discrimination on the basis of sexual and gender difference a thing of the past, has not been realized partly as a result of feminists’ unwillingness to surrender certain ideas about sex and gender. Advocates of sexual rights and religious minorities have also eroded the ground on which the movement once stood firm. And finally, it has suffered from the waning of the broader emancipatory goals of freedom and hope, which has become all too evident in the context of its struggles to reform the law. Critiques of the exclusionary and conservative potential of rights and the liberal project on which they are based has blunted the tools of transformation and left progressive movements, including feminism, rudderless and without a political vision. In this article, I draw upon the experiences of one strand of the movement, sometimes termed the Autonomous Women’s Movements (AWM), which claims to represent all women regardless of class, caste or religious affiliations. I explore the possibilities and limitations of the AWM as a broad-based, emancipatory movement, focusing my discussion on how law has been central to the pursuit of this desire. I discuss some of the unintended consequences of such a strategy and reflect on how to recover a politics of transformation and restore feminism as an intellectually and politically viable force.
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