SOAS University of London

SOAS South Asia Institute

Gender Justice/Injustice in South Asia: Feminism, Protest, and the Neo-Liberal State

THIS EVENT IS ARCHIVED
Gender Justice/Injustice in South Asia: Feminism, Protest, and the Neo-Liberal State

Date: 13 February 2015Time: 10:00 AM

Finishes: 13 February 2015Time: 5:30 PM

Venue: Vernon Square Room: V 111

Type of Event: Symposium

About

This one-day symposium focuses upon both the structural dimensions of gender injustice and emerging contestations and struggles towards achieving gender justice.  Since the December 2012 gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student in Delhi through to the high profile stoning of Farzana Parveen outside of Lahore High Court in Pakistan by male members of her own family and the caste/gender-based rape and lynching of two teenage girls in U.P. in India in May 2014, gender violence in South Asia has been very much in the international spotlight.

The intention of this symposium is to not once again collude in reproducing the spectacle of gender violence in South Asia, but rather to critically engage with movements, policies and processes and to further our understandings of the systemic nature of gender injustice, how it is being simultaneously deepened, transformed and extended by the interventions of the neoliberal state, and the multiple ways in which it is being resisted.

This symposium brings together leading scholars and activists addressing a number of areas, including women’s access to and safety in the public space; the politics of gender in the context of caste and communal violence; neo-liberal notions of ‘rights’; the Indian and Pakistan states’ attempts to intervene in, regulate and control sexuality; religious supremacism and cultural conservatism; and feminist mobilization and protests.

Conveners:         

  • Dr. Navtej Purewal, Deputy Director, SOAS South Asia Institute, University of London
  • Dr. Kalpana Wilson, Senior Research Fellow, Gender Institute, LSE

Programme

TimeTheme
09:30 - 10:00Registration
10:00 - 10:15Welcome and Introduction

10:15 - 11:45

 

 

 

Panel 1: Mobilizing 'Culture' Embedding Violence: Gender Injustice across the public and private
  • Tanika Saekar (JNU): Love Across Borders: Hindutva's Surveillance of Emotions
  • Navtej Purewal (SOAS): The Fracturing Faultlines of the Neo-Liberal State: Attempts to Amend the UK Abortion Act through the Criminalisation of Sex Selective Abortion
  • Agomoni Ganguli Mitra (University of Edinburgh): Sex Selection: Gender Injustice, Medical Ethics and the State
11:45 - 12:00Break

12:00 -13:00

 

 

 

Panel 2: Sexualities: Citizenship, Criminalisation and Representation 
  • Shahnaz Khan (Wilfred Laurier University): Khawaja sara, Eunuchs and Citizenship in Contmporary Pakistan
  • Jennifer Ung Loh (SOAS):  ‘Section 377 has the effect of viewing all gay men as criminals’: Controlling and Criminalising Consensual Male on Male Same-Sex Acts in Contemporary India
13:00 - 14:00Break

14:00 - 15:30

 

 

 

 

Panel 3: Systematic and Epistemic Occupations: Securalization, Sovereignty and Otherin
  • Sumi Madhok (LSE): Of bare life and ‘other’ violence: AFSPA, gender and politics of protest in India's North East
  • Goldie Osuri (University of Warwick): Sovereignty, Postcoloniality, and Gendering Human Rights: Rape and Occupation.
  • Naaz Rashid (University of Manchester): Veiled Threats? Producing the Muslim woman in the UK public policy imaginary
15:30 - 15:45Break
 
Panel 4 : Corporate Capital, 'Empowerment and the Neo-Liberal State: Violence, Disposession and Resistance
  • Kavita Krishnan (All-India Progressive Women’s Association): ’Make in India’: Moral Policing, workers’ organising and the production of a gendered labour force in neoliberal  India
  • Kalpana Wilson (LSE): Neoliberal imperialism, reproductive justice and the violence of India’s population control policies
  • Nirmala Rajasingam (South Asia Solidarity Group): Dispossession not rehabilitation:  Experiences of women in post-war North of Sri Lanka
17:15 - 17:30Summary and Conclusion

SOAS Samachaar

The SOAS Samachaar is a student-led newspaper featuring the content of this symposium. Online edition

Organiser: SOAS South Asia Institute

Contact email: ssai@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: +44(0)207898 4390

Sponsor: SOAS South Asia Institute and LSE Gender Institute