This course will use interdisciplinary and transnational lenses to chart a critical feminist history of gender identities, relations, and struggles in South Asia and in South Asian diasporic communities (especially in the United States and Britain). We will begin by examining the colonial and nationalist imaginations of gender and will then consider how these histories shape postcolonial gender relations and feminist activism in various locations. We will work with the assumption that gender is always already shaped by class, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, ability, etc., and take a close look at South Asian/diasporic women's struggles over laws, sexuality, violence, governance, development, reproduction, migration, and representation, among other things. We will draw upon a variety of feminists texts, including ethnographies, film, and fiction. |