Study Rationale, aims and objectives:
This project studies contemporary feminist body politics of autonomy through a comparative study of two movements – Pinjra Tod in India (Break the Cage on women’s right to mobility and access to education) and UCD for Choice’s campaign to Repeal the 8th in Ireland (on women’s access to abortions). At the outset, one may wonder about the rationale behind comparing two seemingly different feminist movements in very different geographical and political landscapes. Some may also think that the differences between the two political landscapes – with a traditional/non-modern political elite in India versus a modernizing one in Ireland – will render the proposed comparative study unsustainable. However, a closer look at the racialised colonial entanglements between India and Ireland, helps set the scene for analysing the postcolonial legacies as they underpin women’s rights in both countries.
This thesis begins with my lived experience as a woman born into an upper-caste, middle-class family having navigated norms of respectability and sexual morality in India and my intellectual genealogy that begins with my education at an all-women’s college in the University of Delhi. During my time in Delhi, I have lived in a university women’s residence which curbed my mobility on grounds of ‘security’ and ‘protection’. The cognitive dissonance one felt between the lessons on feminist historiography in class and physical restrictions on autonomy were exacerbated when faced with ‘moral policing’ at the hands of the hostel warden and resident tutors. Caste critical feminist scholars in India were able to provide me with the vocabulary and theoretical understanding to piece my experience both within and without the university space, especially heightened in the aftermath of Anti-Rape Protests of 2012. I moved to Europe in 2014 to pursue a Master’s degree in International History where I was faced with a different kind of cognitive dissonance in terms of the sheer lack of engagement with social and postcolonial histories. I veered towards different interdisciplinary spaces like the combined Anthropology and Sociology department at my graduate school, where there were discussions about colonial entanglements and entangled modernity. My exposure to this space further allowed me to understand feminist histories transnationally and thus articulate the rationale behind cultivating a dialogue between ‘seemingly disconnected strands of feminist conversations’ (Mohanty,1991 cited in Nagar, 2000, p. 344). I thus, trace my intellectual genealogy that developed across different geographies in India and Europe, my discovery and resonance with Indian postcolonial feminist scholars and the contemporary movement of Pinjra Tod, which started its resistance against issues around women’s mobility and access to education in 2015.
When I moved to Dublin in 2017, Ireland was gearing up for a referendum which ultimately repealed the 8th Amendment which instituted a constitutional ban on abortions since 1983. My exposure to Irish women’s histories revealed to me the post-independence discourses and processes through which women’s bodily autonomy was regulated especially through institutions like the Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries for unmarried and ‘fallen’ women (Fischer, 2016). My engagement with both Pinjra Tod and Repeal movements’ critique of norms of sexual morality and respectability, further demonstrated how the fight for mobility, access to education and reproductive rights and justice were tied to the struggle for bodily autonomy. However, during the Repeal movement I was surprised at the ubiquitous presence of the tragic story of the death of an Indian woman, Savita Halappanavar, in a maternity hospital in Galway in 2012, which galvanized an intergenerational conversation and support for Repeal the 8th. But the continued flattening of the implications of Savita Halappanavar’s racialised existence in Ireland, alongside the experiences of other migrant women, many of them living modern institutionalised existences under the Direct Provision system, in the mainstream movement, raised important questions around ‘Whose body matters?’ and how the disavowal of certain bodies leads to a disavowal of their embodied knowledge.
During a supervisory meeting, my supervisor introduced me to Black feminist projects that critically engaging the politics of respectability which also have their roots in the colonialist projects of dehumanisation, infantilization and demonisation. Thus, the contemporary Black feminist project of ‘going beyond the politics of respectability’ (Cooper, 2017) that turns on reclaiming the obscured histories of their public intellectualism and the transformative knowledge production carried forward by their activism, offers crucial insights into the epistemic-systemic projects of women’s bodily autonomy transnationally.
To this extent, this project aims to address the following themes:
(a.) It seeks to explore the knowledge politics of respectability that underpin the movements for bodily autonomy in India and Ireland. To this extent, it seeks to unpack the racialised politics of respectability in the Repeal campaign, through a closer analysis of the experiences of young student activists in India.
(b.) It seeks to pluriversalize the white Irish feminist canon on autonomy by focusing on the politics of respectability and knowledge production. This project of pluriversality seeks to ‘shift the dominating Anglo-European centre’ (Ngugi, 1986) by ‘cultivating a multitude of centres through the revitalisation of knowledges – and therefore worlds – ‘otherwise’’ (Escobar, 2007, cited in Chakravarty et al., 2020, p. 175). It does so through a unique theoretical triangulation of Black feminist scholarship on the politics of respectability with the Indian postcolonial feminist scholarship and Irish women’s studies literature on sexual morality and respectability.
(c.) It thus seeks to deepen our understanding of decolonising feminist praxes based on solidarity that ‘neither obfuscate nor remain paralyzed to relations of difference, distance, apartness and inequality through which feminism has traveled’ (Roy, 2021, p. 83).
This project, thus, uses an assemblage of mixed qualitative methods that can ‘connect seemingly disconnected strands of feminist conversations’ (Mohanty, 1991 cited in Nagar, 2000, p. 344). To this extent it rises to the call for cultivating ‘live methods’ (Puwar and Back, 2012) which engage in ‘creative knowledge practices’ by promoting a dialogue between ‘different forms of knowledge production and creativity’ (Puwar and Sharma, 2012, p. 40-46). Such a methodology further allows for an embodied articulation of the conceptual framework for this project, thus, promoting conversations across different geographies of feminist scholarship and organising.
I defended my thesis in November 2022.