Sexuality, Caste, Governmentality: Contests over ‘Gender’ in India

Abstract

This article tracks the journeys made by the term ‘gender’ in India. From its beginnings in the 1970s as a feminist contribution to public discourse, destabilizing the biological category of ‘sex’, we find that gender has taken two distinct forms since the 1990s. On the one hand, gender as an analytical category is being used to challenge the notion of ‘woman’ as the subject of feminist politics. This challenge comes from the politics of caste and sexuality. On the other hand, gender is mobilized by the state to perform a role in discourses of development, to achieve exactly the opposite effect; that is, gender becomes a synonym for ‘women’. Thus, the first trend threatens to dissolve, and the second to domesticate, the subject of feminist politics. This article explores the implications of both journeys in terms of a feminist horizon.