Gender Discourses and the Making of the Indian Constitution

Indian democracy was constituted after a long struggle for self- determination, which ultimately culminated in the making of a constitution for independent India. This article seeks to revisit gender discourses during the constituent assembly debates when women members were seeking for complete gender equality to be written into the constitution. The nationalist discourses on ‘Indian womanhood’ prevalent during the years of the freedom struggle were articulated and reflected in the debates and impacted the writing of the text of the constitution. The final text contains gender progressive provisions on which consensus had been achieved during the nationalist struggle but excludes explicit provisions that would have challenged the roots of patriarchal structures. Thus, while the nationalist movement provided a platform for women to organise for their rights, it also constrained the agenda of transformation.

Doing feminist participatory action research for disrupting traditional gender discourses with Indonesian Muslim kindergarten teachers

The purpose of this article is to explore the authors’ and the co-authors’ reflexivity in feminist participatory action research, conducted in three kindergartens in Indonesia, aiming to disrupt traditional gender discourses in early childhood education settings. Kindergarten is one of the most gendered spaces that perpetuate the binary between femininities and masculinities. This research takes place in Indonesia, one of the most populous Muslim countries in the world. The first part of the study deals with our own reflexivity as university lecturers, middle class and Muslim women, and we use these as a departure point to understand multiple positioning taken by our nine co-researchers as kindergarten teachers, women as well as Muslims and how these influence their gender understanding. The second part of the study discusses the journey of our co-researchers from having gender blind to more gender flexible attitude. As the co-researchers began to acknowledge their personal values, they were better able to apply gender flexible pedagogies to their kindergarten context. The co-researchers also demonstrate different forms of action in implementing gender flexible pedagogy. Our study suggests continuous reflexivity and the possibility of translating gender flexible pedagogy into the co-researchers’ local context were essential factors in this action research.

Woman, time and the incommunicability of non-Western worlds: understanding the role of gender in the colonial denial of coevalness

Central to the functioning of colonialism and coloniality is a specific construction of time, in terms of which the spatial ordering of the world also translates into a temporal ordering. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian argues that there is a specific rhetorical device at work here, namely the ‘denial of coevalness’, which is a colonial distancing strategy through which other worlds are robbed of validity on account of not existing within the same time as the West. In this article, I aim to add to analyses of scholars like Fabian, Chakrabarty and Mignolo by arguing that this colonial temporal ordering, which persists today, is also thoroughly gendered. As a point of departure I use Walter Mignolo’s idea that the denial of coevalness relies on two distinctions, namely nature versus culture, and tradition versus modernity. I argue that the discursive construction of nature (as opposed to culture) and tradition (as opposed to modernity) centres on gendered assumptions and an obsession with control over women’s bodies. In the course of making this argument, I also point out the overlaps, as well as key differences, between woman’s exclusion from Western linear time, on the one hand, and the temporal distancing of the colonised, on the other. In particular, I show how Western linear chronology positions Western women and previously colonised women in vastly different ways. I argue that if one considers the extent to which the denial of coevalness relies on colonial gender discourses, the erasure of indigenous sexuate knowledges that contradict the colonial gender discourses is not one erasure among many, but one of the key erasures that colonial temporality hinges on. A crucial implication of my analysis is that the process of undoing, deconstructing or dismantling the colonial denial of coevalness is also inherently a feminist project.

Performing Sufi Masculinity by Transcending Embodiment in Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh’s Kitāb al-Ḥikam

Through a gendered analysis of Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh’s (d. 709/1309) Kitāb al-Ḥikam (“Book of Wisdom”) this paper demonstrates how the Sufi program offered in the Ḥikam prescribes the performance of masculinity through the transcendence of embodiment. Reading the text’s only reference to women as an occurrence of what Jacques Derrida calls textual self-reference, this essay explores how this statement functions as a key to the text’s gender discourse. The explicit reference, supported by evidence from Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh’s other writings, mirrors the theory of embodiment and gender reflected through the text. This essay illuminates how conceptual descriptions of Sufi spirituality meant to reinforce the importance of transcending embodiment take on gendered meaning when read against explicit comparisons between women, the nafs and the dunyā. This paper highlights ways in which Ibn ʿAṭāʾ Allāh’s spiritual instructions encourage the performance of masculinity through the transcendence of embodiment, thus prompting conversations about spiritual cultivation’s groundedness in and reinforcement of normative gender discourses.

Athena’s claim in an academic regime of performativity: Discursive organizing of excellence and gender at the intersection of heterotopia and heteronomia

From a Foucauldian perspective, we regard “excellence” and “gender” as discourses that become relevant in academia. We analyze the organizational dispositives of “excellence” and “gender” as organizing patterns and rationalities within academic organizations. Beginning with the modern conceptualization of the independent university as a heterotopic space of and for society, the programmatics of the “entrepreneurial university” shift this heterotopic space into a heteronomic one. How do academic professionals bring about discursive organizing of excellence and gender when reflecting on institutional programmatics and organizational strategies for the promotion of early-career academics? What are these early-career academics’ subject positions that are systematically brought about within these organizational strategies? This article discusses two empirical cases involving academic institutions and strategies of discursive organizing. While in the first case of the global player organization, the claim for excellence is made from a position of “already being there,” the second, aspiring organization is still working toward excellence. This article demonstrates that gender discourses in the global player organization are in a marginalized position, while gender discourses in the aspiring organization gain strategic relevance within the organization’s entrepreneurial strategies. This article therefore shows how heterotopic strategies intermingle and intersect with strategies of heteronomic organization of excellence.