Article

Between Politics
and Discipline:
Gender Studies in an
Institutional Setting

Indian Journal of Gender Studies

22(2) 265281
2015 CWDS
SAGE Publications
sagepub.in/home.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0971521515574607
http://ijg.sagepub.com

Deepa Sreenivas1
Abstract
This article draws on the classroom experiences of the author to
reflect on the pedagogic shifts in Gender Studies. Along with its recognition as being a proper discipline and the need to have Gender
Studies at all levels in a university, comes the question of legitimacy. It
must now be defined by boundaries, protocols and methodologies. I
look at the manner in which these conditions unfold in two settingsin
the undergraduate and the research classrooms. In the first context,
young, freshly-out-of-school students appear to view Gender Studies
as a gender sensitisation programme while in the latter methodological/
empirical certainties often take precedence over the need for
analytical probing. In both cases, the initial imagination of the subject
as a critical perspective across disciplines appears to yield to a more
official, programmatic understanding. In my own context, I grapple with
the simultaneous visibility and reduction of Womens/Gender Studies.
Keywords
Pedagogy, discipline, higher education, gender studies

Faculty at University of Hyderabad, India.

Corresponding author:
Deepa Sreenivas, Centre for Womens Studies, School of Social Sciences, University of
Hyderabad, Prof. C. R. Rao Road, P.O. Central University, Hyderabad 500 046, Telangana,
India.
E-mail: deepa.sreenivas3@gmail.com
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This article is about the promise and the impossibilities of Womens/

Gender Studies as they unfold in a classroom. Womens Studies, in its
inaugural moment in the 1970s, was conceived as a critical instrument of
change that could bridge the fissures between academia and the
social and political concerns that drove activist struggles of the time.
The womens movement initiated the search for a new knowledge
that would be responsive to the lives of the vast majority of poor/
rural/marginalised women who remained outside the orbit of official
discourses of planning and modernisation in post-Independence India.
In the wake of Towards Equality, the report of the Committee on the
Status of Women in India (CSWI) in 1974, it became apparent that not
only were women invisible within the discourse around development but
also that the social sciences had failed to provide contemporary analyses
of social and cultural structures that were premised on such exclusions.
During these tumultuous times, protests by women around the alarming
instances of domestic violence, rape, womens unemployment, economic marginalisation as also media representations that objectified
women, pushed feminist academics to raid the hitherto esoteric zone of
the disciplines.1 In these incursions lie the beginnings of Womens
Studies, which has been referred to as the academic arm of the
womens movement. There was a consensus at the first national conference on Womens Studies in 1981 that this new field of inquiry was not
a separate discipline or a special topic but a critical perspective requiring articulation in every discipline, institution in all studies and at all
levels (John, 2008a, p. 7). The social reform movements of the 19th
century had concentrated on womens education but in a way that would
prepare women to be better companions for their educated middle-class
husbands.2 A crucial shift is introduced with Womens Studiesit was
conceived in order to enable the questioning of the existing educational
system and dominant systems of knowledge (John, 2004, p. 19).
Feminist scholars have exhaustively chronicled the complex and
multiple relationships between the womens movement and Womens
Studies. This article, however, locates itself in a more recent moment
when the institutionalisation of Womens/Gender Studies in university
settings is much more of an achieved phenomenon.3 It is removed from
the rough and tumble of the womens movement even as it is marked by
that legacy. One may note that the early envisioning of Womens Studies
as a critical perspective across disciplines has by now found a place
in the academic and administrative imagination of a large number of
universities. This is reflected in the demand on centres of Womens
Studies to offer courses/programmes at various levels and in various
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locations (including intensive workshops for the administrative staff) of
the university. Such official sanction, I hope to demonstrate, is double
edgedthere is a recognition of the transformative potential of the field,
and yet the practical realities of teaching drive home the uncertain terrains
that Womens/Gender Studies must continue to negotiate in the struggle
to find legitimacy. This article points to some of these challenges even
though it runs the risk of being subjective. I draw from my experience of
teaching Gender Studies in a large metropolitan central university, the
University of Hyderabad and I hope that some of the questions and concerns will tie in to a larger discussion on the practice of teaching Womens/
Gender Studies. I recount my experiences in two classroom settingsone
at the undergraduate level, and the other consisting of students at the
MPhil and PhD levels. Both groups of students are clearly different in
terms of age, maturity and the level of exposure they have had to the
rigours and protocols of the disciplinary settings of a university. The pedagogic experience is substantially shaped through these factors. Students
freshly out of school are freer with asserting assumptions and common
sensenot worrying too much about being analytical or with using feminist vocabulary. Research students, on the other hand, are more careful
about the choice of words, and sometimes combine an analytical register
with commonsensical assumptions. In each context the question of gender is articulated with varying degrees of certainty (e.g., We know what
gender is!) and doubt (e.g., Should a Gender Studies course deviate
from the well-recognised registers of violence and bias? Would that not
mean shifting the focus away from real problems that women face?).
While I teach in a Centre for Womens Studies (CWS), the programme
offered by the Centre is titled Gender Studies. This signals a move to
locate the woman/gender question in contingent contexts, premised on
the contemporary understanding of gender as a relational category,
shaped through its relationship with a range of other social and cultural
contexts such as caste and community. It also signals an attempt to
recognise and draw into the curriculum issues pertaining to sexuality
(outside the heteronormative binary) and queer identity/politics.4 In the
following section, I narrate the experience of teaching Gender Studies to
students at the undergraduate level, a group just out of Class 12.

I
I must confess that teaching Gender Studies at the undergraduate level
was akin to getting into uncharted waters for me. The CWS, which has
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been offering courses at the research level since 2008, ventured into this
initiative in 2013. The key factors that led the Centre to this decision
were: the mandate to introduce specialised Womens Studies courses at
all levels and the hope that a course in Gender Studies in the existing
undergraduate programme of the university might be critical for a group
of young students, facilitating a more sensitive engagement with worlds
they inhabit. Moreover, we were encouraged by the official interest
within the university to have Gender Studies in the programme as also by
the enthusiasm shown by student groups. Student representatives from
senior batches of the programme often voiced a need for Gender Studies
at the undergraduate level. They were concerned about what they
perceived as the psychological isolation and bewilderment that students
faced upon entering a large university setting at a fairly young age.
The spatial/institutional positioning of this programme might help us
contextualise these concerns.
The undergraduate programme, housed in the Centre for Integrated
Studies (CIS),5 is located almost 3 km away from the main part of the
university where the schools and centres of the humanities, social
sciences and sciences are housed, resulting in a certain amount of
isolation/alienation for the students studying there. Additionally, the fact
that CIS does not have cultural events such as fiestas and competitions
that are sites for socialisation and entertainment, only adds to their
marginalisation. The subjects on offer are taught by either the regular
faculty or by temporary teachers (known as guest faculty) appointed by
the main departments/centres. This has a significant consequence: the
instructors mostly take the classes assigned to them and are usually not
available for after-class interactions with students.
As guest faculty I had taught Comparative Literature and English
Language at the CIS between 2009 and 2010 and gender was a strong
and prominent component in the courses designed by me. These were
large classes with students from diverse social backgrounds, several of
them vocal and invested in issues of caste and gender. After joining the
CWS as regular faculty, I stopped teaching in the undergraduate
programme but my erstwhile students, now in their senior years, continued to reiterate that Gender Studies at the CIS could provide a space for
engaging with the problems faced by very young students. I sensed that
these problems were linked to insecurities stemming from academic
pressures as also sexuality, caste and psychological issues.
While I was touched by the faith in Gender Studies and its interventionist possibilities, I was apprehensive because these expectations seemed to exceed my academic responsibilities and capabilities.
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However, when the Centre eventually decided to offer Gender Studies
at the undergraduate level during 2012, I opted to teach this course.
In a well-meaning way, and perhaps keeping in mind the objective to
introduce Gender Studies in all disciplines, the authorities at the CIS
decided that it would be an option for students across the humanities,
social sciences and sciences. In my interaction with the administration
concerned, it appeared that this move was also guided by a conflation of
the academic subject of Gender Studies with a gender sensitisation
programme that could promote gender equality and respect for women.
This obviously is a reductionist interpretation of the need for Gender
Studies at all levels and, paradoxically, might have contributed to its
significance as well as marginalisation within the programme.
I shared the course with a teaching assistanta student-friendly,
committed, well-read PhD scholar from Womens Studies. Once we
started, we observed that a majority of the students shared the official
expectation that the course would be a gender sensitisation programme
where the woman teacher6 would speak about the atrocities against
women and the need to treat them as equals.7 This led us to some conclusions about the way 12 years of school education had shaped
their idea of gender. At best it was reformist, at worst patronising.
Manjrekar (2003) has discussed how feminist engagements with the
politics of knowledge have largely bypassed school education which
continued to offer a narrow range of subject positions for girls and
women, locating and even objectifying them as mere instruments in the
narrative of national progress (p. 4577). Irrespective of the guidelines of
the National Policy on Education (NPE) of 1986 which emphasised
the necessity of re-orienting education to promote a gender perspective,
school education has remained marginal to knowledge-building
within the womens movement and Womens Studies (Manjrekar, 2003,
p. 4578).
It was not surprising then that most of the freshly-out-of-school
students in my class had no prior exposure to the concept of gender as a
critical category or to the history of the womens movement. This, combined with the exuberance and irreverence of a class consisting of
18/19-year-olds, posed some difficult challenges for me and the young
teaching assistant. What made matters more complicated was the
status of Gender Studies as an optional subject (worse, as an additional
subject for those who opted for it out of interest, over and above their
mandatory subjects). The students were conscious of the importance of
their compulsory subjectseconomics, political science, history or the
sciences; they hoped to major in one of those subjects. The position of
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Gender Studies also got reflected in a very routine phenomenonthe

timetable where the class was allotted the 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. slot in the
afternoon. As a result, the work for the teachers of Gender Studies began
when the corridors were pretty much empty and one needed to perform
extra hard to hold the attention of the students. As John (2008a) points
out, the mandate for Womens Studies to be a critical perspective across
disciplines runs into very real difficulties when faced with the entrenched
hierarchy of disciplines within a university, pushing it back into a marginal status. In my particular context, despite the institutional eagerness
to have Gender Studies in the undergraduate programme, concrete
conditions signalled its insignificance.
Initially, about 12 students opted for the subject and almost 40 per
cent of them were boys. The girls appreciated the presence of their male
classmates; they believed it was important for a dialogue on gender
issues. I sensed that most girls, despite the absence of complex engagement with gender in school, were more invested in the subject. They had
faced different degrees of discrimination and sexual harassment, and
looked forward to a space where a serious discussion and analysis of
their experiences could take place. Several boys, on the other hand,
strongly believed that the class only called for common sense and
informal exchange. This led me to re-assess my pedagogic strategies.
My initial plan was to begin with discussions around short poems and
news articles or film clips that contested stereotypes and assumptions
rather than with more text-based academic readings. These could be followed by certain critical and introductory pieces along the lines of
Gender (Geetha, 2002) or Patriarchy (Geetha, 2007). In short, a more
interactive approach would lead to lengthier critical texts. I felt that short
texts like Jamaica Kincaids Girl8 or Suniti Namjoshis fables9 along
with short films, advertisements and news articles would resonate with
the everyday social/visual experiences of young people. This approach
was also motivated by a real concern that lengthy English texts might
exclude students from regional-medium schools.
This strategy succeeded in some meaningful waysmost importantly, my studentcolleague and I could draw out the quieter and more
hesitant students. However, at another level, we experienced a definite
pressure to be taken seriously as teachers of Gender Studies, specifically
as we were ourselves women. This was curious because I never had a
similar feeling while teaching gender as part of Comparative Literature
and English in the same venue before. In fact, breaking free from the
printed text and engaging the experiential and everyday aspects of power
had appealed to the students. Ironically, the same approach did not
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appear to work equally well in a Gender Studies course, despite the
centrality of experience in feminist thinking.
I have tried to think about the reasons for this failure. I would
partially ascribe it to the comparatively affluent background of a
majority of the students who opted for Gender Studies but also the
shared (if subliminal) perception that it was a subject that did not merit
the rigours of academic pursuit. In contrast, in the larger English
Language/Comparative Literature classes, many students were from
Dalit and other marginalised backgrounds, who appreciated a pedagogic
approach that moved between text and the world, actively seeking the
politics that could emerge from [their] experience. Some of these students brought a remarkable degree of political literacy to the class; they
were familiar with Ambedkars Annihilation of Caste as also with Che
Guevara. They also took a great deal of interest in public discussions
around caste and other discriminatory practices.10
On the other hand, most of the students who had opted for a more
specialised Gender Studies course perhaps lacked a similar everyday,
embedded notion of power. Obviously, the school itself, with its twin
emphases on nationalist ideology and information-based knowledge had
done nothing to foster a critical understanding of social and political
inequalities. In such a context, lack of text-based teaching reinforced the
pre-existing assumption that Gender Studies was primarily informalit
only called for a generalised indictment of tradition or patriarchy as the
source of womens oppression. This was the case especially with the
boys, who were frequently disinterested, displaying an attitude that said,
This does not happen to me anyway. But, more disturbing, when they
did speak in the class, they reiterated attitudes that are clearly patriarchal
and patronisingThe women in my family are very submissive. I keep
asking them to be stronger. Who can help them if they themselves want
to be like that?
Feminist method and pedagogy are premised upon creating a space
for speaking out and sharing experience. Chaudhuri (2002) writes
about the Womens Studies classroom: The classroom offered such a
space to speak about the hitherto unspoken (p. 255). Second wave feminism in the West had emphasised the need for women to share
experience, and to the naming of the problem with no name. The
womens movement inaugurated a fundamental shift in thinking about
the womens questionfrom women as subjects to be educated to
women as new subjects of investigation and study (John, 2008a, p. 4).
This led to a disruption of official narratives and a recovery of the
voices and experiences of marginalised women. In recent years, several
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feminists, particularly from such backgrounds, have drawn attention to

the historical specificities of Dalit womens experience and marked its
difference from biographies of upper-caste, middle-class women,
centred on individual struggles for liberation (see Rege, 2013). At the
same time, a teacher of Gender Studies must remain alert to the risks of
experience-oriented pedagogy. In a setting where several students share
the assumption that gender is a matter of commonsense, experience
may be used as the basis for re-asserting patriarchal/parochial truths.
An instructor may allow the caste, class and other underlying dimensions
of such experiential truths to emerge through steering discussion, but
this at times leads to endless personalised exchanges (between the
teacher and the student, or between boys and girls) or tense silences.
I discuss below the re-organisation of teaching strategies that my
colleague and I decided to undertake based on these perceptions.
Deviating from a more informal approach, we handed out photocopied articles each week to be read before the next class. These were
short and fairly accessible texts/excerpts discussing a range of concepts
such as patriarchy, family, representation, body, womens history,
womens movement and so on.11 Students seemed to recognise the
validity and legitimacy of printed material as they were used to it in
their other classes as well as through their school years. More important
for us, they suddenly discovered that a great deal of rigour and research
went into theorising gender. For our part, while it gave us some credibility, the challenge now was to ensure that the text did not become the last
word but acted as a catalyst for students to think about their beliefs,
assumptions and experiences in a more reflective mode. We soon noticed
that about four to five boys who had opted for Gender Studies as an
additional subject, dropped out. Perhaps, it was just too much work leading to no tangible returns or professional prospects. The number had
dwindled to about 15 from an initial 20 by the end of the four-month
semester. At the same time, I was struck by the number of women students who found the class worth their while, and approached me several
times after class to find out what they needed to do to pursue a career in
Gender Studies. I am also encouraged by the fact that one of the very few
Dalit students in the class, a science student, though weighed down by
the demands of his compulsory subjects, eagerly participated in discussions and insisted on submitting extra assignments on gender.
In the end, I feel this was a sobering and enriching lesson despite all
the setbacks and inadequacies. As an instructor, I was pushed to engage
with the question of relevance precisely because the class posed certain
difficult questions. This meant finding strategies to communicate the
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critical history and political scope of the subject in small but significant
ways. It also meant finding a tiny foothold in the hierarchy of disciplines
that students are initiated into soon after their entry into the university.

II
This section deals with the pressures at the research level with the
institutionalisation of Womens Studies in higher education. In a university marked by the hierarchy of departmental and school structures,
Womens/Gender Studies must reckon with the need to be placed, identified and evaluated in terms of the concrete output and data it generates
with respect to societal gender disparities. This thrust is further propelled
by the new professionalisation of the subject. Simply put, there is a push
to have well-recognised approaches and methodologies firmly in place
in other words, to be more like the other social science disciplines. Since
Womens Studies emerged from a critique of existing disciplines, and as
inter/trans-disciplinary, it is interesting to note this attempt to moor it to
the protocols of a proper discipline. This trend is much stronger at a
stage well past the undergraduate level where Gender Studies is offered
only as one course among many. Specialisation seems to urgently call
out for disciplinary legitimacy.
I explore this pattern through underscoring certain pedagogic concerns that emerged while teaching Gender Studies to scholars pursuing
MPhils and PhDs in the subject. Once again, my views are context
specific but will hopefully throw up certain more generalisable questions.
I had mentioned earlier that the students in a research-level classroom
are by and large a disciplined lot. However, this apparent calm can be
misleading; the class offers some tough challenges. The students come
from different academic disciplinesmainly from the social sciences
and humanities. Teaching Gender Studies to them entails engaging with
different subjects and the manner in which gender is addressed in these
areas. For the past 3 years, I have been teaching a course titled Gender
Studies: Concepts and Contexts, offered as a compulsory subject to
research students. The course deals with a set of critical concepts in
the subject, and their political and discursive implications. My methodological thrust has been to move away from definitions/descriptions and
bring out the situated and contingent character of gender. A cluster of
readings, for instance, mapped how gendered practices (mothering,
work, body) are shaped by caste, race or community. Similarly, another
set of readings dealt with questions such as sexuality, masculinity,
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representation and so on. Although the focus of this course is on India;

each year I include readings from non-white/non-Western contexts with
the intent to open out the horizon beyond the hegemonic western feminist
texts that students are familiar with.12
Perhaps because of my own background and the fact that my course
has a fair number of readings dealing with media, representation,
biographical accounts and so on, I noticed that students from English
Literature fit in more easily than those from the various disciplines
of the social sciences. I am conscious of this tilt and have, over the past
years, increasingly prescribed texts by feminist economists, historians
and a range of social scientists in general. I do believe these inclusions
have yielded an interesting balance in the course. While Partha
Chatterjees seminal The Nationalist Resolution to the Womens
Question (1989) or Judith Butlers Gender Trouble (1990) may be
received as too abstract and as more in sync with the humanities by
many students, an article by Nirmala Bannerjee or Bina Agarwal draws
enthusiastic participationoften those from non-literature backgrounds
taking the lead.
It is indeed important that an instructor makes her course responsive
to the differential skills and backgrounds of students. Each year I worry
whether a text is accessible to the maximum number of students in a
class.13 If a majority of students find the theoretical register of a text too
intimidating, then the teacher, despite her radical intent, risks becoming
what Sharmila Rege calls the saviour or the sole interlocutor of truth,
thereby re-enforcing the canonical compulsions that exist at the heart of
all pedagogy (2010, p. 95). It helps to set up small extracts from a difficult and erudite text like Gender Trouble alongside more locally
engaged discussions in a range of texts such as newspapers, ethnographic
analysis and autobiographies that complicate gender norms and the
stable notion of sexuality.
This approach, even as it introduces students to an influential text
in the field, attempts not to make it canonical. Second, analytical texts,
life stories and contemporary events are set up in a dialogic mode,
encouraging students to come up with responses embedded in their
own experience. During our discussions on sexuality, a student actively
involved in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement of Hyderabad was led to reflect on the fissures between the LGBT
and hijra communities in the city along the lines of class and caste; he
himself had been disparagingly called Englishpur ki Kothi14 on occasion. I believe that the class offered a space for subterranean tensions to
surface, further fracturing the concept of (alternative) sexuality.
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As obvious in the instance above, concepts continually spilled into
one anotherforeclosing compartmentalised engagement with caste,
community, gender, sexuality and so on. This is in tune with the goals of
the course; however, student responses have been complex and varied.
The disciplinary training of students often prepared them to look for
basic concepts and definitionsin other words, a prior foundation upon
which critique could be built subsequently. Several students come with
the expectation of receiving a definitional and descriptive understanding
of concepts such as gender, patriarchy or sexual division of labour
topics that frequently form the staple of Womens Studies courses. At
certain moments, I sense their bewilderment and frustration in my class.
The question of canon emerges as an important pedagogic question as
I struggle to re-vision the course; the canon cannot simply be dismissed
but needs to be placed in an oppositional relationship with the
non-canonical. Rege has insightfully dealt with similar difficulties in
introducing a critical Phule-Ambedkarite feminist pedagogy in the class:
[D]o we as teachers of particular disciplines have responsibility and accountability to the canonso to say initiate the students into the discipline? When
is the right time at which critique can be introduced? In other words are we
saying that in introducing students to the discourse of caste canon must be
taught before the critical perspectives of Phule, Ambedkar and more contemporary dalit-Bahujan-feminist critiques of the discourse are introduced?
the canon to be deauthorized and demystified must be seen relationally,
so that the canonical and the non-canonical emerge in oppositional confrontation in specific historical conjunctures. (2010, pp. 9495)

The acceptance or rejection of a text/approach by students coming from

diverse disciplinary trainings may be further located in the larger methodological gulf between literature/humanities and the social sciences. A
reading that deals with empirical details speaks to the non-humanities
students. Those from a literature background are used to more theoretical
readings but sometimes express their admiration for those classmates
from the social sciences trained in field research. However, I would like
to foreground the more general resistance in the Gender Studies classroom to texts which stress the normative and the discursive through/
beyond the empirical and the evident. I deal with questions that may not
be bluntly asked but nevertheless lurk unsaid in the background: A reading that deals with culture and norms may be interesting but would it
help us to deal with real issues faced by women? Could these discussions be carried into field research for topics concerning domestic
violence, womens health, or financial inclusion of rural women? I think
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these are important questions that a teacher of Gender Studies needs to

grapple with.
As several feminist scholars have pointed out, distanced from the
immediate contexts of the womens movement in India, students often
treat womens subjugation as self-evident and universal. I note with
some disquiet that a large number of students, even those with an MA
in Womens Studies, are not aware of the foundational texts that
engage with the issues that animated the womens movement in India
including Towards Equality, the report of Committee on the Status
of Women in India (1974). This pattern may be read within the context of the reframing of the goals of a large number of University
Grants Commission-sponsored centres of Womens Studies since the
mid-1990s in accordance with governmental/internationalist discourse
of empowerment (see Anandhi and Swaminathan, 2006). Interestingly,
the 1990s are also the years when several significant eventsthe upper
caste agitations against the implementation of the Mandal Commission
report, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the assertion of Dalit
feminist voicespushed feminist scholars to interrogate the presumed
universality of the feminist subject (see Tharu and Niranjana, 1996).
However, these questions do not appear to have infiltrated the institutional sites of Womens Studies; as Rege notes, there may be a serious
disjunct between Womens Studies as an intellectualpolitical project
and the institutional expansion of Womens Studies in higher education
(2011, p. 5). In my experience, students frequently approach the subject
with firm pre-given notions about what woman or Womens Studies is.
While discussing sexual violence, student responses reflect universalistreformist assumptionsRape is barbaric or Men who commit rape
are animals. This may be attributed to the banality and over-familiarity
of the trope of violence within the discourse, divorced from historical
specificities. It is only once in a while that one hears a voice that links
rape with caste or the politics of visibility; a Dalit woman student once
asked why the continuous sexual violence against women of her community found so little coverage in media. The pre-known character of
violence is entrenched such that when students are faced with a text that
meticulously links the event of sexual violence to institutional contexts
and local power relationships they may find it overtly intellectual.15
Chaudhuri (2002) captures a similar predicament in the Gender Studies
class: My interlocutors [in class] rarely felt the need to pay attention
to specific topic being addressed. It was about women, womens
studies and feminism, and this was enough to entitle them to speak with
legitimacy about men and women (p. 256). I detect a shift in classroom
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dynamics each time a student questions disciplinary commonplaces
from within lived experiences of marginalisation (such as the Dalit
student I mentioned above). But, largely, one witnesses an embedded
faith in the universalmodernist promise of Gender/Womens Studies/
feminism. It is early for me to mark this as a trend but I do notice that
students who are active in political movements and student politics on
campus do not opt for Womens/Gender Studies as a specialisation. This
is partly because more established disciplines such as sociology, political
science or English literature are seen as opening out wider opportunities.
But I also sense a deeper and more troubling reason: Womens Studies is
too closely associated either with a brand of liberated urban feminism
or with the plight of poor, suffering women. Consequently, it is seen as a
field that offers only limited scope for political and academic inquiry.
Perhaps the current institutionalisation of the discourse combined with
the proliferation of research on topics such as domestic violence, trafficking of women or the girl child has contributed to such a perception.
At the Centre we recognise the necessity to break with such stereotyping
and reach out to a more diverse student community through academic
initiatives, collaborations, seminars and other interventions that signal a
broader investment.
This article has engaged with the complexities of teaching Gender
Studies in two different classroomsat the undergraduate and the
research levels. At the undergraduate level, I encountered what may be
termed a disciplinary innocencea majority of the students came with
the view that Gender Studies was unlike other academic subjects and
was merely aimed at bringing about attitudinal changes. As a teacher of
Womens/Gender Studies, I needed to take into account the modes in
which gender/women figured over years of schooling. During this
crucial pedagogic phase, students largely encounter women as icons
(Rani of Jhansi) or as additions to the list of male nationalists/reformers,
or as mothers (in civics or language textbooks). Students were also
trained to privilege a text-centred approach. While I began with a more
informal approach, I subsequently perceived the need to work with this
training to communicate the significance and rigours of Gender Studies
as an academic subject. I would like to underscore that in choosing the
material, the content was as important as the level of difficulty of English.
Looking back on my search to find the right texts, I believe that a well
thought out textbook on Womens Studies may prove to be a useful
resource for the undergraduate teacher.
In comparison with the undergraduate class, the research classroom
perhaps provides a comfort zone: the students are more disciplined and
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bring to the class a certain amount of decorum and academic seriousness,

cultivated through their exposure to the regimen of higher education.
However, deeper fault lines soon emerge. The disciplinary training of
students frequently prepares them to treat gender as an isolatable
category, added on to the existing apparatus of knowledge. Moreover,
there is a general impression that specialisation in Gender Studies means
writing a thesis on womens issues, premised on the hypothesis that
greater access to government schemes or the benefits of globalisation is
a panacea for gender discrimination in all forms. Such an orientation can
be placed in the context of the two distinct trends that have emerged
since the 1990s. On the one hand, the politics of caste and sexuality have
problematised the essentialist notion of woman as the subject of
feminist politics; on the other, within discourses of empowerment and
development gender becomes a synonym for woman, disengaged from
structural and historical inequalities.16 The pedagogic challenge for
the teacher of Gender Studies then is to re-connect with the multiple
and political histories of Womens Studies/movement as also with the
contestations that animate our present.
Notes
1. See R. Kumar (1993) for a critical history of the womens movement.
2. Desai, Mazumdar and Bhansali (2003) point out how the tendency to perceive education as a means of enhancing the primary wifemother role
of women persists in the language of the education commissions of postIndependence India.
3. Over the last decade or so, the more inclusive term Gender Studies has
become increasingly common. In this article I use both terms, but Gender
Studies is what I teach.
4. However, since 20082009 when MPhil/PhD programmes were introduced
at the CWS, the focus has been on topics that routinely figure in Womens
Studiesboth in the courses that are offered. Some of these topics are
social construction of gender, patriarchy, division of labour, the girl child,
trafficking of women and work, women and science and so on. The research
topics chosen by students largely share a similar orientation. I am glad to
note a gradual shift with more students choosing to work on more diverse
and engaged questions relating to region, caste, popular culture and so on.
5. In 2014, this gets renamed as College for Integrated Studies.
6. Chaudhuri (2002) has referred to how women who choose to do Womens
Studies in sociology run up against the perception that their work is not serious enough. The notion that womens studies is merely partial is widely
held (p. 248). In my own case, I felt that while the students thought of other
subjects as real academics, Gender Studies was more of a soft option.
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Sreenivas 279
7. This is not to suggest that this is the sole format of the gender sensitisation
programme, but to indicate the perception of the students.
8. Girl is a short prose-poem written by the Antiguan-American writer
Jamaica Kincaid. Drawing on the writers experience of growing up black,
female and poor in British occupied Antigua, it strikingly demonstrates the
contiguities between race and gender norms.
9. Suniti Namjoshi is an acclaimed lesbian feminist writer known for her imaginative fables that contest/invert traditional arrangements of gender, cultural
and sexual identity.
10. For instance, many Dalit students, especially those from Andhra Pradesh
and Telangana, would be well informed about the histories of caste oppression that led to the massacre of Dalits in Karamchedu and Chunduru in 1985
and 1991, respectively. Clearly for them this was not just news but a memory
that actively informed academics as well as struggles in other domains.
11. Just to give a quick idea about the selection of texts: we had excerpts
from Gender (Geetha, 2002) and Patriarchy (Geetha, 2007), Seeing Like
a Feminist (Menon, 2012), Feminism is for Everybody (bell hooks, 2002)
and Ways of Seeing (Berger, 1973). We would sometimes include newspaper
articles that touched upon a contemporary issuesuch as The Right to Our
Bodies (Bhan, 2012) on the public trial faced by the athlete Pinki Pramanik,
as someone who did not fit into the hegemonic gender binary. Growing up
Male (K. Kumar, 1992) brought in the much-needed perspective on constructions of masculinity, re-directing the gaze on to the boys in the class.
The Biological Connection (Fausto-Sterling, 2002), through a contestation
of the fixity of sexual difference from the perspective of feminist biology,
held the attention of those from science backgrounds. Extracts from Tarabai
Shindes 19th century text Streepurusha Tulana made visible a history of
feminist thinking in India that is simply absent in the school textbooks and
mainstream culture with which students are familiar.
12. Mothering (Ferguson, 2000) is always much appreciated. It records an
African-American single working moms difficult encounters with the
police and the judiciary that view her as a mother incapable of raising her
children in the proper way.
13. During my first 2 years of teaching this class, the introduction to Judith
Butlers classic Gender Trouble (1990) formed a part of the course. However,
most students from regional language/social science background found its
theoretical register too intimidating. I replaced it last year with a cluster
of essays dealing with the fluidity of body/genderThe Disappearing
Body and Feminist Thought (Menon, 2011), Sexual Difference and Their
Discontents: Shifting Contexts of Thirdness in Hyderabad (Reddy, 2007),
Playing Woman, Playing Power: Performing the Goddess. A Reading of a
Documentary on Chapal Bhaduri (Ghosh, 2007) and so on. This strategy
resulted in more inclusive discussions.
14. A feminised male homosexual identityin this case, used to mock a gay
man perceived as elite. See Gupta (2005).
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15. An example would be Rao (2003), where the author painstakingly links
sexual violence to the structural contexts of caste and the judiciary and in
fact, our very modernity. In situations like this I perceive a need for what
Foucault calls eventalisation. To cite Foucault: What do I mean by this
term? First of all, a breach of self-evidence. It means making visible a
singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical
constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness that
imposes itself uniformly on all (1994, p. 226).
16. See Menon (2009) for an extended discussion.

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