Wilting down

27May09

After, months of writing, not writing, redrafting, brooding here’s what I have to say:

Chapter 1: Tackles Nancy Fraser’s argument about the relationship between recognition and redistribution with examples from the Indian social movement organization I am studying. It shows the difficulty of building a working class women’s movement in the face of religious, caste, and ethnic diversity of India.

Chapter 2: Takes on arguments about the relationship of class to gender by providing an overview of the tumultuous relationship between class and gender and other markers of identity through four phases of the Indian women’s movement. It’s the history of movement chapter which ends up arguing that class needs to be recognized as one of master narratuves of the Indian women’s movements. Scholars of the movemnet often recognize religion as one the master narratives but sideline class.

Chapter 3: Takes on Leninst notions of linking ideology to structure in the building of a movement. The organization I am studying borrowed this from the CPI(M) whose “women wing” it is. This chapter is on the structuring of a social movement organization and ends up showing the problems that exist in applying the idea of “democracy in discussion, unity in action” to real politics in this organization.

Chapter 4, 5, 6: Continues this link developed on Chapter 3 between ideology and structure to talk of it in three ways: Time, Space, and Body (TSB). In each of these chapters the movement between rhetorical notions of Time, Space, Body to their habitual, physical notions is mapped to show how a MOVEMENT works.. This is done through examples which almost end up providing a strengths and weaknesses type illustration of building a unified working class women’s movement in the face of India’s identity politics.

Chapter 7: I iz brain dead. Some things I could say: (1) TSB framework of modalities is better for understadning social movements because it helps to link the discursive to the structural, makes connections between the micro and macro processes (Michel de Certeau’s argument) (2) I could also say that in  india’s case we see how the struggle for women’s identity needs to be tied to notions of women’s work (class politics) rather than to the politics community, state or nation (Nussbaum, Rajeshwari SundarRajan’s argument).  (3) I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FUSE THESE TWO IDEAS. WHY?

Filed under: Class, Gender, Indian Left, Keywords, Last Chapter, Leninist, Modalities, Outline, Preface, Unit 1, Unit 3   |  Leave a Comment