Exploring Gender, Redefining the Field:
Feminist Journeys in the Social Sciences, Humanities and the
Arts
Exploring
Gender, Redefining the Field: Feminist Journeys in the Social
Sciences, Humanities and the Arts
For almost three decades now scholars and
creative artists have been redefining the fields that they
have been working in to bring in a different perspective from
the ways in which knowledge and the arts were organised, and
reproduced until then. Gender as an analytical category has
had a major impact on the social sciences and humanities and
has transformed the way we think about disciplines and disciplinary
boundaries. These developments are now fairly well understood.
Less attention has been given to the manner in which feminists
have redefined the performative arts, cinema and photography
as fields to work in, or of the scholarship in these areas.
The study week on gender will bring together
a range of scholars and practitioners of the arts, including
a number of younger women, for an in-depth engagement and
sharing of their work and ideas on the projects that they
have done, or are currently doing. The overarching theme of
the study week will provide for a collective journey for the
participants as they are taken through the current and previous
engagements of other participants. There will be time for
unhurried presentations and discussions on history, science,
literature, films, theatre, photography and folklore.
Among the themes that will be explored during
the study week are the significance of oral narratives in
reconstructing women’s lives and experiences, their
participation in political events and movements such as the
Tebhaga movement of sharecroppers in the forties of the last
century, Muslim women’s lives before and after the events
of 1947 in Bengal, the reconstruction through oral and written
texts of religious and philosophical experiences of forgotten
or unacknowledged women as well as theoretical issues of oral
history as a method for feminist scholars.
Another set of issues in the study week on
gender will analyse the dominance of paradigms in creating
ideas of core and margin in knowledge production across disciplinary
boundaries: presentations will examine the contributions of
feminist literary theories to unpack women’s writing,
the relationship between gender and science and the significance
of the nature/culture binary in constructing knowledge, the
disciplinary traditions in the teaching of social history
and attempts to engender a social history course, subjecting
school text books to close scrutiny to highlight how mainstream
knowledge is constructed and existing inequities recast in
them, and finally how Ambedkar’s writings on women may
be reclaimed by feminist scholarship today.
Other presentations will dwell on the cultural
practices of the 19th and 20th centuries to look at theatre
not only as a ‘stage’ for performance but also
to break the binary between art and work in the lives of women
performers, as also the cultural history of photography in
the post independence period as it dwelt on the everyday creating
a celebrity culture cultures, notions of stardom and fashion
to set the stage for the ‘photograph’ or the advertisement
in creating new cultural practices.
And finally a number of papers will provide
for a sharing of personal journeys in negotiating between
the past as the field of scholarship and the present as the
site of women’s struggles in the doing of women’s
history, finding a way to think about gender and the built
environment—in a way to extend Rokeyya Begum’s
dramatic rendering of the reconceptualising of space in Sultana’s
Dream into the present, rewriting the histories of art and
literature by redefining the body and space in the practice
of theatre, and the impulse to switch fields by making the
move from writing to filming the elusive histories of women.
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