Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia
-Tejaswini Niranjana
Cultural studies in Asia came into prominence in the 1990s.
In the South Asian context, the word feminism was used selectively.
It was used in two different ways ie; Women’s question and Women’s movement.
o The history of cultural studies in India is different from the western context.
o The author speaks about feminism as an intellectual- political project.
o Two interruptions have been noted in British cultural studies in 1970s, one created by
debates around feminism and the other around questions of race.
o Stuart Hall says that feminism was decisive and ruptural.
o It expanded the notion of power that had taken shape earlier.
o Hall refers here to a situation where cultural studies per existed feminism.
o The question of culture is posed in the non western societies as part of a colonial
contestation.
o The question of culture is an intimate part of the formation of nationalist modernity.
o Culture in modernity tends to be represented as something that remains outside of
modernity.
II
The author mentions about Kumari Jayawardene’s book Feminism and Nationalism in
the Third World.
The book argued that feminism and nationalism in the non west share a close
relationship.
While nationalist movements enable women’s political participation, they also create for
them a fixed position in nation culture.
In Japan, Korea or India, New Woman was privileged over the Modern Woman.
Thejaswini Niranjana was privileged to be a part of a series of feminist discussions in
different Asian locations.
1. FUKUOKA, December 2000
They talked about the question of gender in relation to the communist state in China,
where gender difference was made invisible by state policy in the work place. They
discussed issues around women’s labour in the post colonial situation of Bangladesh ;
state feminism in Taiwan etc. The Sisters in Islam, a group of Malaysian women
with a distinct religious identity spoke about their engagement through low and media
with the state. The central question seemed to be the relationship of women with the
state
2. BANGALORE, October 2001
This conference brought together Asian women who discussed women and state,
women’s engagement with civil war, feminism and religious identities, cultural
minorities, queer citizenship, women and the law.
3. BANGALORE, December 2001
This workshop aimed at an assessment of the political -theoretical ground on which
we stand. They explored the current dilemmas of feminists regarding contemporary
political initiatives.
4. SEOUL, July 2005
The conference in Seoul made it abundantly clear that feminists in different locations
even in the same Asian region were confronting different sorts of phenomenon. For
eg : one of the concerns for the feminists in Bangladesh is the growing Islamization
of the society and its consequences for women. Young feminists have to face women
of their own generation to engage with mediatic representations and show how their
political questions are differently framed from those circulating in popular cultural
genres. The studies opened up the question of colonial modernity. It urged to rethink
the space of feminists in politics.
III
In this section the author discusses the impace of feminist concerns on the disciplines in
India. Women’s studies contributed to the rupturing of the disciplines that enabled the
emergence and strengthening of inter discliplinary scholarship.
Conventional disciplines such as English literary studies, history, sociology, economics,
and to to some extent political science were shaken up by women’s studies questions.
Landmark anthologies with important introductory essays like Women Writing in India
(Tharu and Lalitha), a question of silence? (John and Nair), provided glimpses of
feminist scholarships across disciplinary boundaries.
The contributions of Thanika Sarkar (Badramahila), Uma Chakravarthi (Vedic Dasi),
Susie Tharu, Ritu Menon, V Geetha, Kavitha Panjabi etc had impacted cultural studies
syllabi
In addition there is a whole new generation of scholars in history, economics, literary
studies, legal studies and political science who are already publishing their works.
The author turned her attention to the problem of gender in the cultural studies classroom.
She was involved in the early 1990s in teaching women’s studies as an optional course
for humanities and social science students.
Raising gender questions provided a different sort of experience. The setting had
changed.
Students showed some discomfort at being confronted with these questions and
responded by dismissing them.
Metropolitan women students who have benefitted from the achievements and struggles
of the women’s movement but are not interested in claiming the politics and conceptual
vocabularies of feminism are visibly an early 21st century phenomenon in India.
In order to grapple with the pedagogic problem, we need to have a better understanding
of the relationship between feminism and modernity.
IV
In the 1990s, cultural theorists as well as feminists tried to theorize religious identity
questions; the caste question.
Today we need to enlarge our sense of female lives, focusing on the relationship
between women and popular culture, or dealing with changing institutions like family
and marriage.
In visual culture studies and film studies too, we need the development of stronger
feminist research questions.
