Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation

Radhika Govinda

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040302767
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation, Radhika Govinda engages with intersectionality – as critical theory, as critical methodology and as critical pedagogy – to make sense of feminist politics in India and beyond, and knowledge-making on feminist politics, as such. In doing so, she makes a case for theory-making, conducting empirical research and classroom teaching to be understood as integral parts of knowledge cultivation, each feeding into the other. Differently put, the book encapsulates Govinda's engagement, spanning fifteen years and four case studies, exploring what insights an intersectional lens throws up, and how these insights complicate our understandings of marginality, privilege and solidarity in the field of women's and gender studies, in feminist classrooms, in women's and social movements, in particular NGO-led feminist activism, state-led development initiatives and digital feminist campaigns, and in everyday social relations in rural and urban spaces. Uncovering, interrogating and disrupting the politics of coloniality and feminist complicity is an important running thread in the book. Through a reflexive account of her own location and practice in the academy at the cusp of the global north and the global south, Govinda highlights the importance of being attentive to intersectional positionality and to the contextual specificities of engaging in feminist politics and knowledge-making in the age of global neoliberalism.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: intersectionality, coloniality and feminist knowledge cultivation – contours and context
• 1 ‘Third world woman’, feminism and empire
• 2 Doing women’s and gender studies in contemporary India and the UK: interrogating margins and marginalisation
• 3 ‘Mirror mirror on the wall …’ decolonising feminist classrooms: the promise and perils of intersectional pedagogy
• 4 Beyond tropes: Dalit women’s diverse narratives of agency and activism from rural North India
• 5 In pursuit of ‘southern feminism’? Intersectionality, coloniality and NGO-led feminist activism in India
• 6 Towards a renewal of feminist politics? ‘Bad girls’, everyday sexual harassment and activist campaigns in millennial India
• 7 From the rear-view mirror of the taxi driver? Masculinity, marginality and ‘rape culture’ in urban India
• 8 ‘First our fields, now our women’ questions of honour, patriarchy and intersectional politics in Delhi’s urban villages
• Conclusion: insights, dilemmas and hopes in knowledge-making on feminist politics – a meditation
• Bibliography
• Index