Ambivalent Solidarities: South Asian Women’s Intellectual, Affective and Activist Networks
Ambivalent Solidarities: South Asian Women’s Intellectual, Affective and Activist Networks
Editors:
Hiya Chatterjee, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Swarnamoyee Jogendranath Mahavidyalaya, Vidyasagar University
Sreejata Paul, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, Shiv Nadar University Delhi-NCR
Feminist recuperative scholarship[1], though pioneering and incredibly valuable, has introduced a methodological ‘problem’ into the field of Women’s and Gender Studies: the problem of the exceptional woman, the woman so ahead of her time that all others around her are rendered subjects of rescue and reform. Such readings, by dint of their wide-reaching influence, have delineated a one-dimensional and self-replicating route for many later projects centralising South Asian archives of women’s lifeworlds and trajectories. Needless to say, the ‘problem’ is one of scholarship, not of history. Women from the region, whether in premodern or contemporary times, can and should be read as products of the intersubjective encounters they have had, the movements they have participated in, the institutions they have shaped, and the avenues through which they have expressed themselves in a common register with others. In line with such a contention, this edited volume proposes to view women through the lenses of the networks they were part of or the networks they can be placed into. Networks of this kind chart “a number of mechanisms that foster connection and are more elusive than, but just as meaningful as, group membership” (Green 2016: 361)
The volume envisions itself as part of a robust scholarly tradition mapping women’s networks through various modes of positive relationality, such as friendship, companionship, camaraderie, and institutional belonging. It is also interested in representation of such networks in literature and popular culture. The recent historical revival of the interfaith friendship between anti-caste activists and educationists Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh in twentieth-century Maharashtra, the women’s movement in 1980s Pakistan against the draconian ordinances of the Zia-ul-Haq Government, and the women’s demonstration in New Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh against the citizenship acts of the Indian government in the pre-pandemic era are a few examples of the historical and political resistances that have arisen out of women’s solidarities. Payal Kapadia’s film All We Imagine as Light (Malayalam, 2024) spotlights the hospital as a site of women’s camaraderie through the characters of the migrant workers Prabha, Anu, and Parvaty. Anthropologists and cultural historians have studied the various same-sex friendship rituals in different parts of South Asia which occur during local festivals such as Makar Sankranti (Pintchman 2007, Vanita 2002). Gayatri Gopinath (2000) identifies the visual codes and women-only spaces invoked in popular Hindi cinema to depict “the slippage between female homosociality and female homoeroticism” (285).
However, such scholarship often downplays intellectual and ethical conflicts among the actors whose lives and work it seeks to animate, considering these to be unsavoury details that must be glossed over. The editors acknowledge that such conflicts can, in fact, prove fertile grounds for reading the affective and passionate beliefs that prompt women to confront and manoeuvre challenging endeavours. Debates among women leaders belonging to the Congress and the Muslim League over communal electorates, despite the fact that they often attended meetings of the All India Women’s Conference together, is a case in point (Forbes 2005, Sinha 2006). Moreover, women’s activism does not necessarily attempt to resist and subvert the status quo, emerging as it often does from majoritarian and authoritarian trends (Butalia and Sarkar 1995). Therefore, the volume also seeks submissions that view women as part of networks constituted by so-called negative relationality such as ideological opposition, critique, competitiveness, and disaffiliation, as well as those that examine women’s alliances as contrived solidarities, including offshoots of statist ideology.
The volume is open to submissions that showcase how women are drawn into provisional or temporary networks and paradoxical alliances whereby “new offshoots […] cut across older connections, sometimes retracing former links or making unexpected points of contact” (Gleadle 2013: 525). Nagesh Kukunoor’s film Dor (2006, Hindi) focuses on the unlikely bond between Zeenat and Meera, the former’s husband accused of killing the latter’s, in order to portray the role of clemency in the Saudi interpretation of Sharia. Thrity Umrigar’s novels The Space between Us (2006) and The Secrets between Us (2018) and Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine (1992) underscore the complexities of inter-class, interfaith and intergenerational connections between women belonging to different social strata.
Finally, the volume also welcomes posthumanist approaches towards human-nonhuman entanglements which explore how contemporary feminist and queer studies and activism address the problems of the radical individualism of the Anthropocene. Water, for instance, emerges as an agentic entity in Wave: A Memoir of Life after the Tsunami, a biographical account of a Sri Lankan academic who lost her entire family to the sea and Shaila Abdullah’s “Rani in Search of a Rainbow” set during the Pakistani floods of 2010.
Possible themes for chapters:
Women’s social, political and cultural alliances
Interregional friendships among women
Women’s alliances in STEM
Queer belongings and activism
Representations of female and queer alliances in literature/art/film/other media
Female/queer bonds in mythology
Interfaith, inter-class and inter-caste friendships among women
Same-sex friendship rituals and traditions across South Asia
Entanglements of gender, queerness, and the nonhuman
Women’s digital networks
Womances
Spaces of women’s sociality
Women’s and feminist movements
Women’s associations
Women’s conferences
Women’s ideological opposition and critique
Contentious networks among women
Feminist affiliations and disaffiliations
Women’s contrived solidarities
Lexington Books have preliminarily shown interest in publishing this volume as part of their series Feminist Strategies: Flexible Theories and Resilient Practices.
Please send an abstract of 250 words and a brief bio-note of 50 words to ambivalentsolidarities@gmail.com on or before the deadline mentioned below.
Important dates:
Last date for submission of abstracts: 10 March 2025
Selection of abstracts and sending out of acceptance/rejection mails: 2 April 2025
Last date for submission of full papers: 31 July 2025
[1] See Bambara and Traylor 1970, Gilbert and Gubar 1979, Gilbert and Gubar 1985, Moers 1976, Moraga and Anzaldua 1981 and Showalter 1977, for example.