Mothering India

Author(s):  
Susmita Roye

Mothering India concentrates on early Indian women’s fiction, not only evaluating their contribution to the rise of Indian Writing in English (IWE), but also exploring how they reassessed and challenged stereotypes about Indian womanhood, thereby partaking in the larger debate about social reform legislations relating to women’s rights in British India. Early women’s writings are of immense archival significance by virtue of the time period they were conceived in. In wielding their pens, these trend-setting women writers (such as Krupa Satthianadhan, Shevantibai Nikambe, Cornelia Sorabji, Nalini Turkhud, among others) stepped into the literary landscape as ‘speaking subjects,’ refusing to remain confined into the passivity of ‘spoken-of objects.’ In focusing on the literary contribution of pioneering Indian women writers, this book also endeavours to explore their contribution to the formation of the image of their nation and womanhood. Some of the complex questions this book tackles are: Particularly when India was forming a vague idea of her nationhood and was getting increasingly portrayed in terms of femaleness (via the figure of an enchained ‘Mother India’), what role did women and their literary endeavours play in shaping both their nation and their femininity/feminism? How and how far did these pioneering authors use fiction as a tool of protest against and as resistance to the Raj and/or native patriarchy, and also to express their gender-based solidarity? How do they view and review the stereotypes about their fellow women, and thereby ‘mother’ India by redefining her image? Without studying women’s perspective in the movement for women’s rights (as expressed in their literature) and their role in ‘mothering India’, our knowledge and understanding of those issues are far from holistic. A detailed study of these largely understudied, sadly forgotten and/or deliberately overlooked ‘mothers’ of IWE is long overdue and this book aims to redress that critical oversight.

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yaniv Voller

AbstractThe struggle against gender-based violence in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region has witnessed some significant achievements since the late 1990s. A subject long excluded from public discourse in the region, it has now moved increasingly into the mainstream, compelling the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to take legal and practical measures against such practices as honor killings, female genital mutilation, and domestic violence. This article traces the sources of these shifts in the KRG's stance, looking especially at the role of transnational women's rights networks in the region. It highlights these networks’ successful strategy of binding their cause to the KRG's endeavor to legitimize and consolidate its contested sovereignty over the Kurdistan Region. In doing so, the paper addresses an underexplored subject in the literature on women's rights campaigns in the Kurdistan Region and contributes to the study of transnational advocacy as a source of normative change.


Author(s):  
Zahra Ali

This chapter explores the evolution of gender and women’s rights struggles in Iraq since the establishment of the Personal Status Code in 1959 and shed light on the ethnosectarian fragmentation of women’s legal rights in post-invasion Iraq. The chapter argues that in order to explore women’s rights and conditions of lives in Iraq it is essential to explore the evolution of women’s rights and gender issues historically and through a complex lens of analysis rather than applying a predefined argument involving an undifferentiated “Islam” or age-old gender-based violence. It seeks to show that gender issues have been entangled with issues of nationhood, religion, and with the nature of the political regime since the very foundation of the Iraqi Republic in 1958. First, the chapter examines the debates and mobilizations around women’s legal rights in Iraq. Secondly, it highlights the development of political, economic, and military violence since the 1980s and its impact on gender norms and relations. Finally, it analyzes the specific context of ethnosectarian fragmentation in which Iraqi women have lived and mobilized since 2003.


2019 ◽  
pp. 105-134
Author(s):  
Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom ◽  
Valerie Sperling ◽  
Melike Sayoglu

Chapter 4 explores the inter-network dynamics between the human rights and women’s rights communities in Russia, and how the uneasy relationship between these two sectors of civil society helps keep Russian women’s sex-based discrimination claims from percolating up to the ECtHR. We draw upon our interviews with feminist activists and human rights activists in Russia to shed light on the experiences of feminist activists within the human rights and international litigation communities in Russia. We find that the separation between women’s rights and traditional human rights networks in Russia has until recently excluded feminist lawyers from learning how to take cases successfully to the ECtHR through legal training. We compare the experiences of feminist activists and the reception of Russian human rights NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) to gender-based claims of human rights violations to the strikingly different experiences of LGBT rights activists who have found common cause with human rights organizations in Russia in trying to contest hate crimes and other rights violations in court.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Susmita Roye

Indian Writing in English (IWE) today boasts of internationally renowned writers, both male and female. In comparison to the vast amount of critical work on contemporary women writers, the roots of Indian women’s fiction in English are still gravely understudied. The aim of this book is partly to fight that amnesia and draw some of the early works by women out from their long, undeserved eclipse.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-46
Author(s):  
Yetimwork Anteneh Wondim

Irrespective of their contribution, women in Ethiopia have been facing issues like violence, gender-based discrimination, access to education and training, lack of basic human rights protection, and others. Girls' enrollment in education at all levels is much lower than boys. Female education is hampered mainly by the sexual division of labor, which confines girls to household activities. In addition, women have been suffering from gender-based violence under the guise of tradition and culture but condoned by society. In response to these problems, the Government of Ethiopia adopted relevant instruments pertaining to gender including the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), The Beijing Platform for Action, The Ethiopian Constitution, and various other policies and establishing the national machinery for addressing gender issues. However, several challenges still exist in the realization of women's rights. Therefore, all the respect and protection given for human rights should also be given to women because women's rights are human rights.


Author(s):  
Naila Farah

Today's women's issues are still very important to pay attention to because women's rights have not been fully fulfilled. The marginalization of women's rights often stems from local religious and cultural beliefs. This is where the importance of the thinking of figures like Asghar Ali Engineer is reviewed in the present. This paper discusses the thoughts of Asghar Ali Engineer about liberation theology in the matter of women's rights in Islam. Asghar Ali Engineer in many of his works has offered various kinds of deconstruction of discourses. In the matter of women's rights in Islam, he presents his opinion on inheritance, wealth, testimony, the position of women in the family, polygamy and divorce which are considered as examples of inequality. With its hermeneutic interpretation, Asghar Engineering rejects the existence of a patriarchal concept that is inherent in the classical interpretation of the Quran, which is considered discriminatory against women. Then he applies the verses of the Quran into two, namely normative and contextual, with the hope that the verses of the Quran can be reinterpreted, so that it truly becomes a universal verses of “das solen” on one side and contextual verses of “das sein” on the other. Thus, the equality of men and women can be realized and gender-based justice can be manifested.


Author(s):  
Johanna Bond

In the colonial and postcolonial period, African women have advocated for legal reforms that would improve the status of women across the continent. During the colonial period, European common and civil law systems greatly influenced African indigenous legal systems and further entrenched patriarchal aspects of the law. In the years since independence, women’s rights advocates have fought, with varying degrees of success, for women’s equality within the constitution, the family, the political arena, property rights, rights to inheritance, rights to be free from gender-based violence, rights to control their reproductive lives and health, rights to education, and many other aspects of life. Legal developments at the international, national, and local levels reflect the efforts of countless African women’s rights activists to improve the status of women within the region.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-52
Author(s):  
Danielle Roper ◽  
Traci-Ann Wint

In 2017 the radical women’s rights group known as the Tambourine Army emerged in response to gender-based violence, sexual abuse, and structures of impunity in Jamaica. The group used hashtags, organized marches, and teach-ins to encourage women to speak out against their abusers, to break the silence surrounding sexual abuse, and to advocate for survivors. Situating the Tambourine Army within traditions of women’s protest and contemporary forms of cyberactivism in the Caribbean, this essay examines the ways the group enacted a sonic disruption to the public and cyber spheres. It chronicles the rise of the movement, explores the centrality of the digital in the members’ activism, and assesses the methods deployed in the group’s contestation of postcolonial ideals of respectability.


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