Defining Girlhood In India

Download or read book Defining Girlhood in India written by Ashwini Tambe and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2019-10-16 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At what age do girls gain the maturity to make sexual choices? This question provokes especially vexed debates in India, where early marriage is a widespread practice. India has served as a focal problem site in NGO campaigns and intergovernmental conferences setting age standards for sexual maturity. Over the last century, the country shifted the legal age of marriage from twelve, among the lowest in the world, to eighteen, at the high end of the global spectrum. Ashwini Tambe illuminates the ideas that shaped such shifts: how the concept of adolescence as a sheltered phase led to delaying both marriage and legal adulthood; how the imperative of population control influenced laws on marriage age; and how imperial moral hierarchies between nations provoked defensive postures within India. Tambe takes a transnational feminist approach to legal history, showing how intergovernmental debates influenced Indian laws and how expert discourses in India changed UN terminology about girls. Ultimately, Tambe argues, the well-meaning focus on child marriage has been tethered less to the interests of girls themselves and more to parents’ interests, achieving population control targets, and preserving national reputation.

Download or read book Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India written by Mytheli Sreenivas and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

Download or read book Sex, Law and the Politics of Age written by Ishita Pande and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An innovative study of the establishment of 'age' as a political category in late colonial India.

Download or read book Codes of Misconduct written by Ashwini Tambe and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, legislators in Bombay passed a series of repetitive laws seeking to control prostitution. During the same time, Bombay's sex industry grew vast in scale. Ashwini Tambe explores why these remarkably similar laws failed to achieve their goal and questions the actual purpose of such lawmaking.

Download or read book Rethinking New Womanhood written by Nazia Hussein and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-04-09 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, Rethinking New Womanhood effectively introduces a ‘new’ wave of gender research from South Asia that resonates with feminist debates around the world. The volume conceptualises ‘new womanhood’ as a complex, heterogeneous and intersectional identity. By deconstructing classification systems and highlighting women’s everyday ongoing negotiations with boundaries of social categories, the book reconfigures the concept of ‘new woman’ as a symbolic identity denoting ‘modern’ femininity at the intersection of gender, class, culture, sexuality and religion in South Asia. The collection maps new sites and expressions on women and gender studies around nationhood, women’s rights, transnational feminist solidarity, ‘new girlhoods ’, aesthetic and sexualised labour, respectability and ‘modernity’, LGBT discourses, domestic violence and ‘new’ feminisms. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, sociology, education, media and cultural studies, literature, anthropology, history, development studies, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies.

Download or read book Mental Health of Indian Women written by Bhargavi V Davar and published by SAGE Publications Pvt. Limited. This book was released on 1999 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering book discusses the mental health of Indian women from the twin perspectives of feminism and the philosophy of the social sciences. Reviewing data and documented material covering broad areas such as theory, research, clinical practice and policy, Bhargavi V Davar addresses issues of: the epidemiology of mental distress among Indian women; the aetiology of mental illness in terms of socio-demography, violence and culturally specific distress behaviours; gender bias in mental health services; and the female `self' in the context of mental distress.

Download or read book Dwelling in the Archive written by Antoinette M. Burton and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through an analysis of the writings of three 20th century Indian women, this book explores how the memoirs, fictions, and histories written by women can be read as counter-narratives of colonial modernity.