REVIEW OF WOMENS STUDIES

Feminist Research Is a Political Project

Kalpana Kannabiran, Padmini Swaminathan

his issue of the Review of Womens Studies (RWS) coincides with the 125th birth anniversary of Babasaheb
Ambedkar, a celebratory moment in our collective intellectual and political travels. As Sharmila Rege observed in her
introduction to Against the Madness of Manu, it is possible to
go through a postgraduate degree in the social sciences in
India today without ever encountering the work of Ambedkar
(2013: 13). Yet, a careful reading of Ambedkar opens out unimaginable possibilities for research, writing and sociopolitical
engagement and has historically led to the tracing of different
histories and futures of feminism and anticaste politics in
India (2013: 56).
It is also extremely important to register that the moment
we are poised at is one where womens studies, gender studies
and feminism have been challenged in fundamental ways. We
take note of Connells (2015: 52) concern that the deficit of
recognition of scholarship from the global periphery is a
structural problem of feminist thought on a world scale.
Intersecting with this is the fact that feminist scholarship even
within the periphery has very rarely, if at all, engaged with the
ways in which gender is deeply embedded in social location and
constituted by it. Speaking of contemporary India, the violent
realities of patriarchal heteronormativity, caste, the many
faces of Hindu majoritarianism and neo-liberal marketplaces,
for instance, constitute bounded discourses around gender that
do not displace the foundational bases of dominant certainties.
And yet, there is an overturning of these very certainties on
an everyday level both in intellectual production and in lived
experience, at an enormous cost to life, security and freedom,
in that order. At the precise time when this volume was taking
shape, universities and colleges across India witnessed an
earth-shaking challenge to encrusted practices of caste, reductionist definitions of the nation, Hindutva and its constitutive violence, and blatant derogation of life and liberty, in
which university administrations have been complicit. This
has also been a time of intense debates, disagreements and
painful reflections on the meanings of discrimination, and the
thin and ever fading line between suicide and murder. At the
centre of the churning is the interrogation of decay and
institutional irresponsibility that has dropped deep roots into
our university systems in particular and higher education in
general. From the structure of the curriculum, to allocation of
research supervisors, due diligence by teachers, monitoring of
student research, and selection of areas for research, there is
little doubt that dominant trends in teaching and research
persist in being exclusionary and negligent of the diversity of
lifeworlds and fundamental questions of human dignity.
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At this moment of crisis, turbulence and rebirth (witnessed,

for instance, in the vibrant Dalit Bahujan interrogation of
culture and politics, and also in the everyday resistance in
practice, speech and writing, especially from the North East and
Kashmir), the question of feminist method must be revisited
and the feminist project reconstituted. We are witness to the
shifting of the core of intellectual production, a moment that must
be sustained, especially by feminist scholars if feminism is to
be relevant for our futures. It is in this spirit that we urge new
thinking on questions of method in feminist research. What are
the new methodological departures feminism might signal?
In order for feminist methodologies to nurture practices of
self-reflexivity, they must move beyond marking identitites to
providing cogent accounts of the processes by which actors
occupy standpoints in particular contexts. The collection of
essays presented in this issue of the RWS addresses feminist
methodologies from diverse disciplinary standpoints.
The opening essayan autobiographical narrativeby Joan
Mencher explicates concretely the feminist understanding of
reflexivity, namely, the way researchers consciously write
themselves into the text; it traces over six decades of experience
as a public anthropologist and feminist researcher, looking at
questions of caste (from an Ambedkarite perspective), matriliny and most recently sustainable agriculture and its social
formations. Menchers early essay The Caste System Upside
Down or The Not-So-Mysterious-East (1974) is an important
contribution to the anthropology of anti-casteperhaps the
only one in the period that she was writing on this question.
This is followed by Ghazala Jamil who looks at practices of
segregationof Muslims in Delhidefining her own location
in relation to her research, and unravelling for us the knots
that tie the feminist researcher to her informant-collaborators
on the field. Jamil attempts to disrupt dominant discourses on
prejudice, discrimination and segregation of Muslims by looking at the micro-foundations in everyday life that undergird
macro-explanations with respect to inter-group dynamics and
the play of power, class and gender, among other factors.

We would like to thank the Guest Editors Kalpana Kannabiran,

and Padmini Swaminathan and the members of the editorial
advisory group of the Review of Womens Studies Mary E John,
J Devika, Kalpana Kannabiran, Samita Sen and Padmini
Swaminathan for putting together this issue on Feminist
Methodologies.
The advisory group wishes to thank Janaki Abraham, V Geetha,
Chitra Kannabiran, Mangai, D Venkat Rao and U Vindhya for
reviewing the papers presented here.

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If the point of feminist knowledge creation is not merely to

unveil invisible categories, Banu Subramaniam argues, but
rather to reinvent knowledge by resisting the very production
of difference, how might this impact on science, scientific
endeavour and the structures of scientific practice? She
explores the implications of the rejection of the natureculture
binary for feminist science studies. What are the epistemological
challenges of studying gender in the sciences and what
methodological tools may be productively deployed for the
purpose of understanding the relation between human and
non-human, life and non-life?
At a historical moment of moral policing, violent stigmatisation of the other, and moral panics, and a reining in of questions of sexuality into the discourse on rights as opposed to
honour, Brinda Bose coaxes us to travel through humanities
on an irrational wanton terrain away from the logics of rights,
power and punishment via an engagement with praxis, form
and situation into sharp materialist-hedonist possibilities of
language, pleasure, profanation, the precarious and the tragic,
using sexualities as a tool.
Critical medical anthropologists argue that structural violence
on grounds of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, caste, community,
etc, leads to health disaparities. Feminist researchers and practitioners have demonstrated the ways in which social location
and ideologies of family determine access to healthcare, especially for women. Cecilia Van Hollen describes her specific
experience as a feminist critical medical anthropologist interested in understanding poor womens access to healthcare in a
neo-liberal economy.
Tracing the emergence of sexual violence as an object of
anthropological research, Pratiksha Baxi argues that this is a
product of historical, political and social processes that critique
the constitution of rape as a public secret. Importantly, ethnographic writing about rape demands practices of transformative reading that inaugurate reading practices that displace
horror, shame or voyeurism of any kind.

Research from different countries in the global South have

pointed to ways in which the consolidation of neo-liberal
regimes, despite its attendant violence, has created greater
opportunities for education for women, or enhanced womens
autonomy in new workplaces (Connell 2015). Bhavani
Arabandi describes her research in worksites in HITEC city in
Hyderabad, exploring the possibilities and limits of womens
freedom, autonomy and choice in private and public realms.
The idea of this collection of essays focusing on feminist
methodologies crystallised around our discussions on pedagogic
practice and experience in classrooms across disciplineseconomics, sociology, development studies, gender studies,
disability studies and law, among othersand our learnings
from feminist research and writing in other disciplines and
locales. While we could recall a rich array of published work,
the challenge of teaching feminist methodologies remained.
Specifically, we are interested in exploring how scholars have
approached questions of method in feminist research in India.
If we argue, as we do, that feminist research is at its core a
political project, what are the concrete processes through
which method takes shape at the intersections of politics and
location, to produce knowledge of a different order?
This collection, in our opinion, provides a glimpse of this
knowledge.
Kalpana Kannabiran (kalpana.kannabiran@gmail.com) is with the
Council for Social Development, Hyderabad; Padmini Swaminathan
(pads78@yahoo.com) is with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences,
Hyderabad.

References
Connell, Raewyn (2015): Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World
Scale, Feminist Theory, Vol 16 (1), pp 4966.
Mencher, Joan P (1974): The Caste System Upside Down or The Not-So-MysteriousEast, Current Anthropology, Volume 15, No 4 (December), pp 46993.
Rege, Sharmila (2013): Introduction: Towards a Feminist Reclamation of Dr
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Against the Madness of Manu: B R Ambedkars
Writings on Brahmanical Patriarchy, Selected and Introduced by Sharmila
Rege, Navayana 2013, New Delhi, pp 1356.

Review of Urban Affairs

April 23, 2016
Greenfield Development as Tabula Rasa:
Loraine Kennedy, Ashima Sood
Rescaling, Speculation and Governance on Indias Urban Frontier
Scaling Up, Scaling Down: State Rescaling along the DelhiMumbai Industrial Corridor
Shriya Anand, Neha Sami
Dholera: The Emperors New City
Preeti Sampat
Making of Amaravati: A Landscape of Speculation and Intimidation
C Ramachandraiah
Reading into the Politics of Land: Real Estate Markets in the South-west Peri-urban Area of Chennai
Bhuvaneswari Raman
The Politics of Urban Mega-projects in India: Income Employment Linkages in Chennais IT Corridor M Vijayabaskar, M Suresh Babu
Making Sense of Place in Rajarhat New Town: The Village in the Urban and the Urban in the Village
Ratoola Kundu
New Regimes of Private Governance: The Case of Electronics City in Peri-urban Bengaluru
Mathew Idiculla
For copies write to: Circulation Manager,
Economic and Political Weekly,
320-321, A to Z Industrial Estate, Ganpatrao Kadam Marg, Lower Parel, Mumbai 400 013.
email: circulation@epw.in

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