(Dis)enchantment of Women and Gender in South Asia: Hermeneutical Engagement to the Poetics of Protests

Abstract

This talk examines the varied hermeneutical approaches to gender(ed) resistances in contemporary times — varied subversions and alike that builds on strong means of gender resilience and a culture of disenfranchised/subaltern, that escapes the potent symbols of essentialized identity, cultural authenticity and visions of society and nation in an ideological terrain shaped by Imperialism and modernization. Translated as an alternative to Anglophone liberal feminism, I would attempt to critic the reformist discourses of colonial South Asia. Rather, hermeneutical arguments anchored around the idea of ‘community’ , ‘nation’, ‘gender’, ‘representations’, ‘sexuality’ –a new way of the postcolonial governance and political imaginations to-be-a-Muslim woman or gender(ed) subaltern in South Asia.

The idea is to delve deep within the intellectual discourse of a specific moment in with an unique hermeneutic engagement in this work would attempt to build ‘protest’ as the foundational value that is important of ever-emergent relations in anchoring imagination of the gendered-self.  This discursive representation that I would narrate, is an organic and rhetorical move with multiple sources of self and belonging, refuting any single moral yardstick –but a sense of belonging that frames nationalist imagination, new sense of claiming citizenship, a commitment to self-representation, articulating cultural practices of shared lives, rituals and protests –a new and modern modes of women or the ‘other’. The primacy of reflexivity, belonging, mode of action, experiences of everyday life that invigorates solidarities and a new form of discursive activity –a new vocabulary and fresh poetics that is inescapable in relation to experiences and significance of the self –potentially contradicting the normativized state-articulated identity politics –rather, hermeneutics of the gender(ed) self in India with a new directions.