Equivocations of Gender: Feminist Storytelling and Women’s Studies in the Contemporary

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the stories that women’s studies in India tells about itself—its beginnings, trajectories and situations in the contemporary. Deploying the term ‘feminist storytelling’, the article focuses particularly on the origin stories that it diligently narrates. Feminist storytelling is to be understood here as a certain account-taking, a certain history-telling. It necessarily entails that we choose from a multitude of details; that we select and omit. It means that we plot different elements in terms of causality, sequence, consequence that we frame a beginning, middle and culmination. In other words, storytelling demands that we configure and construct—a temporal range, definite perspectives, priorities, order, conflicts, tempo, significations and resolutions. This article zeroes in on two stories that are repeatedly called upon to mark the beginnings of women’s studies: (i) the long fertile 19th century with its clamour over the ‘women’s question’ and (ii) the tumultuous decade of the 1970s which witnessed twinned events—the publication of the Towards Equality report and the emergence of the autonomous women’s movement. The particular manner in which women’s studies claim these histories, the article argues, mediates present dispositions and the modes by which women’s studies orients itself in the world. It conditions the responses we formulate under the sign of gender and in the name of woman. After analysing a few key renderings of ‘feminist storytelling’, this article quickly sketches a cartography of impasses confronting contemporary women’s studies. Several of these, it proposes, can be traced back to the origin stories propounded by feminist storytelling.