THE CENTRE FOR WOMEN, LAW

AND SOCIAL CHANGE

of Jindal Global University, in conjunction with the Australian National University
Presents the conference

FEMINISMS OF DISCONTENT:
GLOBAL CONTESTATIONS
Debates on Gender and the Law

February 18-20, 2011

Vivanta by Taj, (Ambassador), New Delhi

Corporate Sponsors
 Programme

FRIDAY MORNING, 18th FEBRUARY 2011

Venue: JGU Classrooms & JGU Public Lecture Hall
Sujan Singh Park, Subramania Bharati Marg, New Delhi

9:30 am - 12:20 pm Interaction with students and Visiting

Participants:
Professors will visit the JGU campus and deliver lectures/
interact with students in various courses that are compatible with
their area of scholarship.
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm Official Launch of the Conference on “Feminisms
of Discontent: Global Perspectives”& Lunch with
JGU Faculty
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm Roundtable between Visiting Participants and
JGU Faculty
Margaret Thornton, (Professor of Law, Australian National
University) who will lead discussion on the “Corporatization of
Universities and the Relevance of Gender”.
Jaya Sagade, (Professor, Hon. Joint Director, Institute of
Advanced Legal Studies, ILS Law College, Pune) who will lead
discussion on “Doing Gender in the Law classroom in India”.
All visitors and JGU faculty are invited to share their views on
the role/ relevance of feminism/ gender in the Global Law Class-
room and Curriculum.
2:30 pm -3:00 pm Campus Tour
3:00 pm Departure from JGU to Hotel, Delhi.
After brief respite, taxi to Conference venue

FRIDAY EVENING, 18 FEBRUARY, 2011

Venue: Vivanta by Taj (Ambassador)
Sujan Singh Park, Subramania Bharati Marg, New Delhi

6:00 pm - 6:30 pm Informal Tea

6:30 pm - 6:45 pm Welcome
6:45 pm - 8:15 pm OPENING PANEL: CONTEMPORARY
CHALLENGES TO DOING FEMINISM AND LAW
Focus: Has feminism run out of steam as a viable analytical
political project? While terms such as “gender justice”, “access
to justice for women”, or “women and law” continue to be the
focus of feminist activism and legal reform projects, the political
project appears to be in crisis. Appropriation of the project by
the religious right as well as neo-liberalism has left the project
without a political vision or a distinct political mooring. At the
same time there is a sense of nostalgia for a past, a longing for the
“golden era” of feminism, when it was engaged with law while also

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 advancing a political vision of transformation. The panel engages
with the despair that has overtaken the ranks and asks whether
it is time to pronounce the final rites on the feminist project? If
not, how does the project move from a space of imminent demise
to a place of intellectual salience? How does feminism remain
relevant in the legal arena (domestic and international), the law
classroom and in legal scholarship?
Participants:
Brenda Cossman (Professor, Faculty of Law, University of
Toronto)
Ratna Kapur (Faculty, Geneva School of Diplomacy and
International Relations, Visiting Professor, Jindal Global Law
School)
Uma Narayan (Professor, Department of Philosophy, Vassar
College)
Moderator: Oishik Sircar, (Assistant Professor, Jindal Global
University)
8:15 pm Dinner

SATURDAY 19 FEBRUARY 2011

Venue: Vivanta by Taj (Ambassador)
Sujan Singh Park, Subramania Bharati Marg, New Delhi

9:00 pm - 9:30 pm Breakfast

9:30 pm - 11:00 pm PANEL II: GENDER, NEO-LIBERALISM AND
`GOOD GOVERNANCE’
Focus: In what ways have rule of law and good
governance projects that facilitate the market, impacted
on the construction of gender? Sexuality? Culture?
And understandings of family? How has the neoliberal
development agenda worked to reinforce gendered roles
and inequality in the workforce and household? How has the
rhetoric associated with seemingly ‘progressive’ endeavors,
such as microfinance, reflected a philosophy which uses
women as a means to an end – namely, economic growth?
Participants:
Kerry Rittich (Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, and
Women’s and Gender Studies Institute, University of
Toronto)
Shirin Rai (Professor, Department of Politics and
International Studies, University of Warwick)
Margaret Thornton (Professor of Law, Australian
National University)
Moderator: Pallavi Kishore (Assistant Professor, Jindal
Global Law School)
11:00pm - 11:15pm Coffee/Tea

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11:15pm - 12:45pm PANEL III: CONTESTING LIBERAL
EQUALITY AND GENDER
Focus: The panel focuses on a central plank of feminist
politics, namely the struggle for equality. In what ways have
feminist pursuits brought about more equality in women’s
lives? Or has the struggle for equality produced more law
and invited greater regulation into women’s lives rather
than transformation? Can we think through other ways
in which to engage equality and the state? or is the entire
project unredeemable, destined to remain nothing more
than another ruse of power by a liberal state?
Participants:
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Professor, Department of
English, New York University)
Lakshmi Arya (Associate Fellow, The Centre for the Study
of Culture and Society)
Maneesha Deckha (Associate Professor, Faculty of Law,
University of Victoria)
Moderator: Amit Bindal (Assistant Professor, Jindal
Global Law School)
12:45pm - 1:45 pm Lunch
1:45 pm - 3:15 pm PANEL IV: PRODUCING A VICTIM POLITICS
THROUGH LAW
Focus: How can feminism become a more productive
legal and political analytical tool that does not merely
reify gendered norms? Can subjectivity, in for example the
realms of sex work, the media, conflict and post-conflict
situations, etc., be articulated other than as a victim? Other
than exclusively through the lens of violence?
Participants:
Kamala Kempadoo (Professor, Department of Social
Science, York University)
Vasuki Nesiah (Associate Professor of Practice, Gallatin
School, New York University)
Anagha Tambe (Lecturer, University of Pune)
Moderator: Oishik Sircar (Assistant Professor, Jindal
Global Law School)
3:15 pm - 3:30 pm Coffee/Tea
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm PANEL V: QUEERING OF FEMINISM OR
“TAKING A BREAK” FROM FEMINISM
Focus: In light of the Naz Foundation decision and the
strides being made in legal scholarship by queer scholars,
are we entering an era of `Queer Politics’? Should feminism
cede to queer scholarship in the search for new ways to
think about political and legal transformation? What does
“queer” scholarship have to offer that can avoid some of the
traps that have produced the despair in feminist thinking?
How can the “queer” engage law in ways that can be

3
 transformative? Is there still work that needs to be done or
that is being done by feminism? Gender? A queer feminism?
What is the “added value” of queer scholarship and how can
it avoid being yet another hegemonic project and retain its
critical edge, especially in the legal arena?
Participants:
Brenda Cossman (Professor, Faculty of Law, University
of Toronto)
Shohini Ghosh (Professor,Sajjad Zaheer Chair, AJK, Mass
Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia
University)
Arvind Narain (Founder member, Alternative Law
Forum)
Brinda Bose (Associate Professor of English, Delhi
University)
Modera.75tor: Dipika Jain (Assistant Professor, Jindal
Global Law School)

SUNDAY, 20 FEBRUARY 2011

Venue: Vivanta by Taj (Ambassador)
Sujan Singh Park, Subramania Bharati Marg, New Delhi

10:00 pm- 10:30 Breakfast

10:30-12:00 PANEL VI: INCLUSIVE REPRESENTATION:
GENDER, FAITH AND THE POLITICS OF LAW
Focus: The session seeks to generate debate on the issue of
faith/religion and law and the response to this concern by
feminists and progressive politics. Some responses have ranged
from a refusal to engage (as religion is per se viewed as anti-
secular) and a reassertion of a liberal vision of secularism,
to simply proclaiming the death of secularism. What new
challenges confront feminism/progressive thought in light of
the increased influence of dominant religious ideologies in the
law and the contest over the meaning of secularism? How does
this entry, particularly salient in India the Ayodhya verdict,
further exclude religious minorities and other communities,
including women, from the equal protection of the law and from
access to justice? Is there space for religious feminism? Can
progressive politics including feminism generate a response
beyond merely appealing to a liberal project that is already
in crisis? Is there any space for religious feminists? Does the
response to some of the conflicts we have witnessed in the
contemporary period require faith to be taken more seriously in
any progressive political vision and scholarship, rather than be
dismissed, or viewed in opposition to secularism?
Participants:
Neera Chandhoke (Professor, University of Delhi, and
Director of the Developing Countries Research Centre)
Vinay Lal (Professor, Department of History, Faculty of

4
 Social Sciences, University of Delhi)
Smita Sehgal (Associate Professor, Lady Sri Ram College)
Aziza Ahmed (Assistant Professor of Law, Northeastern
University School of Law)
Moderator: Kum Kum Sangari (Professor of English)
12:00 – 12:20 Closing Remarks
12:30 Lunch
Afternoon Activities in Delhi (optional)

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 PARTICIPANT PROFILES

ANAGHA TAMBE
Lecturer, KrantijyotiSavitribaiPhule Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune

She is working with the KrantijyotiSavitribaiPhule Women’s Studies Centre,

University of Pune since 1997. At the KSP Women’s Studies Centre- engaged in
a project on ‘Developing Teaching and Research Capacities in Women’s Studies:
Reimagining Higher Education in Social Sciences and Humanities’ sponsored by
the Higher Education Initiative of the NavajbaiRatan Tata Trust- This project
involves initiating teaching programmes in Women’s Studies, production of
learning teaching materials, organizing annual seminars and workshops for
teachers and researchers, teacher fellow programme and so on.

Abstract
Beyond the Dichotomy of Trafficking/ Sex Work: Making of a Devadasi/ ‘Jogtin’
Prostitute

The conceptualization of prostitution is as contested as its legal and moral

status. The last two or three decades have witnessed ‘sex war’ over defining and
consequently regulating prostitution, that has now evidently reached an impasse
which needs to be addressed by an historical investigation of the different practices
of prostitution. This paper sights one of the dominant practices through which
prostitution is organized in contemporary India, that of devadasi practice/
‘sacred prostitution’ prevalent among lower castes and dalits. It examines why
the Maharashtra Devadasi Practice (Eradication) Act 2008 has evoked hardly any
response, curiously in the context of public debate over the prostitution question.
It thus analyzes jogtins operating on the peripheries of the temple and engaged
in ritual, cultural and sexual labour for the ‘village’, as against the much debated
temple women of colonial India. It tries to map the changing articulation of the
devadasi practice in post- colonial Maharashtra by analyzing the popular literary
texts focusing the devadasi practice.

ARVIND NARAIN
Founder member of the Alternative Law Forum in India, a collective of young
lawyers who work on a critical practice of law

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He now works on issues pertaining to human rights and also with specific reference
to the human rights of those who are discriminated against on the basis of gender
identity and sexual orientation. As part of his work he has been a part of two
fact finding reports on sexual minorities in India. The PUCL-K Report of 2001
highlighted human rights violations against sexuality minorities and the 2003
Report of the PUCL-K very specifically looked at human rights violations against
the transgender community. He is also the author of Queer: Despised sexualities
and social change and co-editor of Because I have a voice: Queer politics in India.
He can be contacted at: arvind@altlawforum.org.

Abstract

In the light of the decision of the Delhi High Court in Naz Foundation v NCR
Delhi, what should a queer politics be about? Is the task of queer politics to
press for the inclusion of citizens discriminated on the basis of their gender and
sexuality within the existing democratic framework? Or can one take it one step
further and argue that there are implications of the queer perspective for the
question of a democratic practice? Using the example of the challenge to Sec 377
in contemporary India, this paper will argue that a queer perspective can throw
up questions about the way democracy is practiced and will make an argument
about how the re-imaging of a democratic future is an integral part of a queer
political vision. Thus the imagination of a queer politics is not merely about access
to rights for queer citizens but to question structures which limit the very potential
of human freedom.

AZIZA AHMED
Assistant Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law

She teaches reproductive and sexual health and rights, international health law,
and property. Her research areas lie at the intersection of health and law, human
rights, feminist theory, critical race theory, and critical legal theory. She has a
law degree from the University of California Berkeley, a Masters of Science in
Population and International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health,
and a Bachelor of Arts from Emory University. Professor Ahmed’s scholarship is
interdisciplinary often draws from both public health and law methodologies and
literature.

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Prior to joining the Northeastern faculty, Professor Ahmed was a Research
Associate at the Harvard School of Public Health Program on International Health
and Human Rights. She came to that position after a Women’s Law and Public
Policy Fellowship with the International Community of Women Living with HIV/
AIDS (ICW). At ICW, Professor Ahmed engaged in numerous human rights
projects pertaining to HIV and AIDS. Professor Ahmed has worked on human
rights and social justice issues in South Africa, Namibia, the Caribbean, India, and
the United States. She has worked with and for various United Nations agencies,
international, and domestic non-governmental organizations.

Abstract
Feminist Strategies for Justice: A Legal Realist Analysis of the Role of the State in
Women’s Equality

In countries where traditional and religious law has a sanctioned role, feminists
often turn to secular courts and legal mechanisms to find solutions to perverse
decisions made in the context of these traditional and religious legal mechanisms.
The sought after solutions could be both at the state and international level and
typically concern issues that might occur in traditional or religious formal or
informal courts sanctioned by the state. Such is the case in India where a common
strategy for Muslim feminist groups has been to attempt to involve the state to
rectify injustices caused in the context of Muslim personal law and within local
judicial mechanisms. This paper questions the reliance of feminists on secular
institutions based on a legal realist understanding of state law making institutions
and global governance mechanisms.

BRINDA BOSE
Associate Professor of English, University of Delhi

Professor Base earlier taught at Hindu College, Delhi, and was a Fellow of the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library from 2006-09. Her areas of research are gender
and cultural studies in South Asia, and modern and postcolonial literatures. She
is the editor of Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives(2002), Translating Desire:
The Politics of Gender and Culture in India (2003), and Gender and Censorship
(2006), and the co-editor of Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World
Women’s Literature and Film (1997) and The Phobic and the Erotic: The Politics
of Sexualities in Contemporary India (2007)

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 Abstract
Is “All Art ... Quite Useless”? Some Notes on Queering the Humanities in the
University

Has the movement against Section 377 brought significant changes to gendered
spaces in Indian universities during the past decade? I will examine whether,
and how, ‘gender’ as an established theoretical tool for reading the humanities
– and literature in particular – is being queered in the classroom and outside
it on campuses. Gender studies had been traditionally seen as analogous to
women’s studies, read through feminist tracts and critiques that identified
women’s positions as marginalized and disempowered, and women’s politics as
collusive or resistant. Queer studies has given this tired paradigm a new lease of
life in the classroom, perhaps its own shot-in-the-arm coming from fresh turns
in contemporary sexuality politics in the country. We now seem to be witnessing
a parallel movement in university spaces like corridors, plazas and gardens in
which the politics of reading literary texts through radical queer frameworks, for
example, are being extended to assertions of non-normative sexual choices and a
spreading support for queerness on campuses. This is not to say that homophobia
– in response to texts as well as lifestyles – is not still visible and disruptive, but to
mark, analyze and interrogate an identifiable turn towards queering the gendered
space in/through the humanities in the Indian university.

JAYA SAGADE

Professor, Hon. Joint Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, ILS Law
College, Pune

Professor Sagade is Vice Principal of the ILS Law College, Pune, India. She did her
LL.M. (1979) and Ph.D. (1991) from the University of Pune. She taught in the ILS
Law College from 1981 to 1989 and joined the post graduate Department of Law,
University of Pune as a Reader in 1989 and continued there till 1997. In 1991 she
visited the USA as a CIP - Fulbright fellow. She came back to the ILS Law College in
1997. Thereafter she did her S.J.D. (2002) from the University of Toronto, Canada.
Dr. Jaya Sagade’s areas of interest are gender and law, family law, human rights,
and reproductive health. She has prepared draft of uniform civil code along with
her colleagues. She has to her credit number of publications. She has written a
monograph on Human rights for the Ford Foundation, New Delhi, India. Her book

9
on Child Marriage in India is being published by the Oxford University Press. She
has written a book on Law of Maintenance and edited a book on Women, Law
and Justice in a regional language. She has completed three research projects
on women’s issues. She has participated in many national and international
conferences and presented research papers.

KAMALA KEMPADOO

Professor, Department of Social Science and is affiliated with Latin American

and Caribbean Studies, Women’s Studies, Political Science, Social and Political
Thought, and Development Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada

She is a former director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought
at York University. She has lived and worked in Britain, the Netherlands, the
USA, several countries in the Dutch- and English-speaking Caribbean, and, since
2002, in Canada. Professor Kempadoo teaches courses in Caribbean studies,
‘Third World’ and transnational feminisms, sex work studies, Black Studies, and
critical perspectives in gender and development.  Her publications include Global
Sex Workers (Routledge 1998); Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the
Caribbean (Rowman and Littlefield 1999); Sexing the Caribbean (Routledge 2004)
and Trafficking and Prostitution Reconsidered (Paradigm 2005).  She is also series
editor of Transnational Feminist Studies with Paradigm Publishers.

Abstract

Sex trafficking, criminal justice and transnational feminism: in my presentation I

will reflect upon these three main narratives about human trafficking and discuss
the global politics of knowledge about the nexus of migration and prostitution.
I argue that the migrant woman and sex worker are used to express a growing
unease with an array of social injustices and human right violations, but their
silences, especially that of women from the global south, is starkly evident in much
of the debate. Some of the consequences of the three narratives for the agency of
the migrant and sex working woman will be addressed.

KERRY RITTICH

Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and
the School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Toronto

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Professor Rittich teaches and writes in the areas of labour law, international
law and international institutions, law and development, human rights, and
gender and critical theory. Among her other publications are Recharacterizing
Restructuring: Law, Distribution and Gender in Market Reform (The Hague:
Kluwer Law International, 2002); (with Joanne Conaghan, University of Kent),
Labour Law, Work and Family: Critical and Comparative Perspectives, (Oxford
University Press, 2005); ”Core Labour Rights and Labour Market Flexibility: Two
Paths Entwined?”, Permanent Court of Arbitration/Peace Palace Papers,Labor Law
Beyond Borders: ADR and the Internationalization of Labor Dispute Resolution,
(Kluwer Law International, 2003); “The Future of Law and Development: Second
Generation Reforms and the Incorporation of the Social” in David M. Trubek and
Alvaro Santos eds., The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006); (with coauthors Atleson,
Compa, Sharpe and Weiss), International Labor Law: Cases and Materials on
Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy (West Publishing, 2008); and “Black
Sites: Locating the Family and Family Law in Development” and, with Janet Halley,
“Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law: Genealogies and Contemporary
Studies of Family Law Exceptionalism”, both in a recent special issue on family
law in the American Journal of Comparative Law. She obtained an LL.B. from
the University of Alberta in 1992 and an SJD from Harvard University in 1998,
and was a Law Clerk to Madame Justice Claire L’Heureux-Dubé at the Supreme
Court of Canada in 1992-93. Professor Rittich was the Mackenzie King Visiting
Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard Law School and the Weatherhead Center
for International Affairs, Harvard University in 2004; a Jean Monnet fellow at
the European University Institute in 2005; a Visiting Professor at the Centre for
Transnational Legal Studies in London during the fall of 2008; and a Visiting
Professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University
during the spring of 2009.

Abstract
Transformative justice after Neoliberalism

Gender activists and scholars, both domestic and international, must now confront
the fact that the dominant postwar framework in and through which we have
approached equality and freedom is in disarray. The transformation in respect of
governance provoked by the normative and institutional assaults of neoliberalism

11
has revealed how much feminist engagement has depended on foundational
assumptions about the role of the state, the possibilities of law, and the nature and
trajectory of the social contract – towards greater equality and inclusion – that
are either passing away or under deep challenge. Probing the effects of historical
preoccupations and blind spots such as the focus on public law activism and
constitutional and human rights, this discussion will venture some thoughts about
productive points of engagement now, arguing that enormous costs, as well as
benefits, are at stake in the area of economic governance.

KUMKUM SANGARI

Professor of English

KumkumSangari has published extensively on literature, critical theory, religious

conversion, medieval oral and devotional traditions, nationalist figures such as
Gandhi and Annie Besant, as well as contemporary gender issues such as personal
law, domestic labour, the beauty industry, widow immolation and communal
violence. She is the author of Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender,
History, Narratives, Colonial English, and coeditor ofWomen and
Culture, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, FromMyths
to Markets: Essays on Gender. Her teaching and research interests include
Cultural and Literary Studies, Women’s Studies and Feminist Theory.

LAKSHMI ARYA

Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore

She recently obtained a Ph.D. in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi. She works as Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and
Society, Bangalore. Her research interests span feminist philosophy, law and
history.

Abstract
Normativity, Power and Feminist Politics: Some Questions for Indian Feminism

The paper will investigate certain foundational concepts that underlie Western
feminist theory—concepts such as normativity, power, selfhood, and action—and
how they inform its political horizon of emancipation. Further, I will question
whether these concepts have salience in other cultures. Have these precepts and

12
the possibility of emancipation they engender informed the feminist horizon in
cultures such as the Indic too, and to what effect?

I would rely on the Mysore archive to ground this inquiry. Ethnographic material
for the 19th to mid-20th century Mysore shows that there were a plethora of
practices in Mysore that exceeded normative social arrangements of marriage,
inheritance, divorce and fidelity. These practices qualified as both “adulterous’ and
“bigamous” in the British definition of the criminal law (i.e. the Indian Penal Code
that was enacted in 1860).

What do these practices tell us about ways of life in Mysore? Do these ways of life
defy the absolute “oughts” and “ought-nots” of normativity? Does the “adulterous
woman” exist as an absolute category in Mysore, as she does for Western feminism?
What accounts for this cultural difference? How do we articulate a feminist
politics, how do we articulate a feminist politics, how do we think of power, in
the absence of normativity? What is the telos of freedom that politics then moves
towards? For, so far, (Western) feminist politics has largely posited its praxis as
emancipation from normative prohibition, from absolute ought-nots. Has Indian
feminism derived these frames without theorizing the specificities of the Indian
context seriously? How can these questions be re-thought?

MANEESHA DECKHA
Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria

Professor Deckha’s research interests include critical animal studies, intersectionality,

feminist analysis of law, law and culture, and bioethics. Her work has been published
in Canada and internationally in legal and interdisciplinary venues including
Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Medical Law Review, Canadian Journal of Women
and the Law, Hastings Women’s Law Journal, UCLA Women’s Law Journal,
Harvard Journal of Gender and Law, Wisconsin Journal of Law, Gender & Society,
Ethics & The Environment, Animal Law Review, Journal of Animal Law and
Ethics, Stanford Journal of Animal Law and Policy, and Unbound: The Harvard
Journal of the Legal Left. She has also contributed to several anthologies relating
to feminism, cultural pluralism and health law and policy, and she is the recipient
of grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council, and the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program. In 2008,
Deckha held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law & Society at New York University.

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 Abstract
Postcolonial Feminism: Liberal Feminism’s (Humanist) “Sister”?

Postcolonial feminism has been a critical intervention into both western feminist
theory and postcolonial studies. It has highlighted not only the salience of global
North/South power relations to women’s lives, but also how gender works in
conjunction with other markers of culturally constructed difference (culture,
nationality, race, class, sexuality) in Othering processes. It has thus productively
avoided reductive western liberal feminist accounts of “women” and “women’s”
issues. Yet, postcolonial feminism’s departure from liberal feminism is limited by
the humanism the two share. Humanism is a primary axis around which western
liberal traditions that reinforces a masculinist and colonial human/nonhuman
dualism. Postcolonial feminism maintains this hierarchical central feature of liberal
traditions and thus the exploitation of vulnerable human and nonhuman subjects
it continues to promote. To complete its critical and anti-essentialist engagement
with the complexities of gendered Othering processes and bring about social change,
postcolonial feminism must adopt a posthumanist sensibility.

MARGARET THORNTON

Professor of Law and ARC Professorial Fellow, Australian National University,

Canberra

She has degrees from Sydney, New South Wales and Yale Universities. She is a
Barrister of the High Court of Australia, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences
in Australia and a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law. Her
research spans the areas of feminist legal theory, discrimination, legal education,
legal profession and the corporatisation of universities. Her current research
project examines the retreat from social justice within a neoliberal climate in
the context of discrimination. Her most recent book is an edited collection, Sex
Discrimination in Uncertain Times (ANU E Press, 2010 http://epress.anu.edu.au/
discrimination_citation.html).

Abstract
Global feminism in a neoliberal frame

Neoliberalism is currently the favoured political philosophy all over the world.
With its adulation of the market, it favours competition, the private accumulation

14
of wealth and promotion of the self. The shift away from state responsibility for
securing distributive justice to the individual, together with the vagaries of the
market, contributes to gender in-equality rather than equality.

The paper will consider the contradictions arising from the impact of neoliberalism
on feminist struggles for equality and gender justice. Illustrations will be drawn
from the globalisation of capitalist production with its constant search for ever
cheaper sources of labour and new markets. Nevertheless, while free trade
agreements and multinational corporations’ desire for untrammelled freedom
in developing countries is ostensibly exploitative, employment in new industries
may boost the economic and political power of women in their communities in
unprecedented ways.

NEERA CHANDHOKE

Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi; Director,

Developing Countries Research Centre, University of Delhi.

Professor Chandhoke is the author of 2003, The Conceits of Civil Society,

NewDelhi, Oxford University Press. 1999, Beyond Secularism: The Rights of
Religious Minorities, NewDelhi Oxford University Press; 1995, State And Civil
Society: Explorations in Political Theory, New Delhi, Sage. Edited Books; 2009,
Contemporary India, New Delhi, Pearsons, along with Praveen Priyadarshi;
2000, Mapping Histories, NewDelhi, Tulika; 1994, Grass-Root Politics and Social
Transformation, Delhi,University of Delhi Press, along with Ashish Ghosh; 1996,
Understanding The Post- Colonial World: Theory and Method, New Delhi, Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library.

Abstract
Exploring the Concept of Secularism

How do we go about trying to restore secularism to its proper place in our collective
thinking and practice; as a guiding precept of political practice? The task is urgent
because secularism has become at the best an appropriable concept, and at the
worst a term of disparagement. Witness for instance that whereas members of
the Hindutva brigade dismiss committed secularists, these very people do not
say that they themselves are not secular. In fact, they are the real secularists, the
rest of us are pseudo at best. Matters are further complicated when perfectly well

15
meaning people dismiss secularism because it, in their opinion, has led successive
governments to pamper the minorities.

The second problem is that secularism is oddly enough consensual and contentious
at the same time. It is consensual because every political leader feels the need to
publicly proclaim her secular credential. It is contentious because different parties
to the debate hold different understandings of secularism. We are just not sure
that two or more parties to the debate mean the same thing when they invoke
the secular principle. Therefore, it is perhaps time that we begin to unravel the
meanings of secularism and see which of these meanings proves appropriate for
our particular situation.

We can go about exploring the many meanings of secularism in two ways. One
we could take a look at the various theoretical formulations on secularism on
offer and see which of these theoretical formulations is apt for our society and our
polity. Secondly, we could revisit our history and see how and why the concept
of secularism emerged in and for Indian society. The second way of investigating
secularism may prove profitable, simply because good historical understanding is
a necessary pre-requisite for good political understanding. Therefore, the task that
I have set for myself is to investigate the distinctive meaning that secularism has
acquired in India, as equality of all religions.

But the concept of equality also needs to be unpackaged. The Hindu right is fairly
comfortable with the idea of formal equality as coded in the concept of sarva
dharma sambhava. What it is not comfortable with is the idea of substantive
equality which dictates that the vulnerable need special protection. But this meaning
of secularism as substantive equality is only available to us when we relocate the
concept of secularism in the constitutive context of equality, democracy, rights and
freedom. Or that secularism cannot be understood in abstraction from democracy
and the attendant principles of democracy, because it derives its essential meaning
from these antecedent moral concepts.

Locating secularism in the principle of democracy and equality has one further
advantage; it will ensure that both inter-group as well as intra group relations are
regulated by the norms of equality. Whereas secularism defends equality between
religious groups, it is clueless when it comes to gender inequality within religious
groups. Equality might help us to negotiate both issues from the same perspective.

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RAJESWARI SUNDER RAJAN

Global Distinguished Professor, Department of English, New York University

Professor Sunder Rajan has been a Senior Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library, New Delhi, and taught in the English faculty at the University of
Oxford where she was Professorial Fellow of Wolfson College. Her publications
include Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (1993),
The Scandal of the State: Women, Law and Citizenship in Postcolonial India
(2003) and, most recently, the co-edited volume Crisis of Secularism in India
(2007). 

Abstract
From Antagonism to Agonism: Shifting Paradigms of Women’s Opposition to the
State

Judith Butler’s perception of a shift in feminism’s relationship to the state in

Antigone’s Claim serves as a useful starting-point for my reflections in this essay.
It leads into an exploration of the political and historical reasons for the turn
from the “antagonistic” model of opposition to the state that this literary icon
has long represented, towards a modality of struggle that might be described as
instead “agonistic.” Central to my understanding of a different, agonistic, feminist
politics is MrinaliniSinha’s analysis in Specters of Mother India (2006) of the
circumstances surrounding the mobilization of Indian women around the passage
of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in colonial India in 1929.

RATNA KAPUR

Faculty, Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Visiting

Professor, Jindal Global Law School

Professor Kapur has served as the Senior Gender Advisor with the United Nations
Mission in Nepal. She has also taught as a visiting professor at a number of law
schools around the world, including most recently at Yale Law School. She has
been a part of the Global Faculty at NYU School of Law, and a visiting professor
at Georgetown University Law Centre and the National Law School, Bangalore.
She has also been a fellow at Harvard Law School and  held the Human Rights
Chair at Dalhousie Law School, Nova Scotia. Kapur has written extensively on
feminist legal theory and postcolonial legal studies. Kapur’s recent publications

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include “Un-Veiling Equality: Disciplining the “Other” Woman through Human
Rights Discourse” in Mark Ellis (International Bar Association) and AnverEvon
(University of Toronto) (eds.) Islamic and International Law; Searching for
Common Ground (forthcoming 2010); and “Emancipatory Feminist Theory in
Postcolonial India” in AakashRathore Singh and SilikaMohapatra (eds.) Indian
Political Thought: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2010). Kapur’s latest book is
Makeshift Migrants: Gender Belonging and Postcolonial Anxieties (Routledge,
2010).

Abstract
“Putative Power? Critical Reflections on Feminist Engagements with Law in
India”

The paper examines the specific challenges confronting feminist engagements

with law in India in the contemporary moment and whether feminism can
forge a new political direction at a moment when the revolution lies in tatters. I
examine some of the primary assumptions on which feminism has been based,
and then discuss some of the challenges posed to feminism, at the national and
international level, especially from sexual and religious minorities, as well as
from the “women’s rights industry.” These challenges appear to have imperiled
rather than empowered the enterprise.

The paper considers how the sense of despair that has overtaken the ranks of the
feminist movement in India is symptomatic of the malaise being experienced by
progressive politics and theory more generally. I end by asking whether there is
space to recover a politics of transformation and revolution in the current moment
of neo-liberal economics and globalisation? How can a deeper interrogation of the
assumptions about the subject, history and progress on which law is based assist
in recovering a politics of transformation and restore the possibility of feminism as
an intellectually and politically viable project?

SHIRIN RAI

Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies and Director of the

Leverhulme Trust Programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament,
University of Warwick

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She studied at the University of Delhi (India) and Cambridge University (UK)
and joined the University of Warwick in 1989. Her research interests lie in the
area of feminist politics, gender and political institutions, globalisation and
development studies. She has written extensively on issues of gender, governance
and development.

Her latest works are Feminists Theorize the International Political Economy,
Special Issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (co-ed. With
Kate Bedford) The Gender Politics of Development (2008, Zed Books/Zubaan
Publishers) and (co-ed) Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives (2008,
Palgrave). Her book Gender and the Political Economy of Development (2002,
Polity Press) was widely acclaimed. Her articles have appeared in journals
including: International Feminist Journal of Politics, Global Networks, New
Political Economy, Hypatia and Signs.

She has consulted with the United Nations’ Division for the Advancement of
Women and UNDP. She is a founder member of the South Asia Research Network
on Gender, Law and Governance and on the Editorial Board of International
Feminist Journal of Politics, Politics and Gender, Global Ethics and Indian Journal
of Gender Studies and Political Studies Quarterly. She is the co-editor (with Wyn
Grant) of Perspectives on Democratic Practice.

She is Director of the Taught Masters (MA) Programme in Globalisation and

Development at Warwick.

Abstract
Social Reproduction and Depletion in Neoliberal Times

The focus of feminist debates on social reproduction has been both conceptual
(what delimits domestic/work? In what ways is it gendered? What does this
gendered understanding tell us about the way in which capitalism/society
reproduces itself? What are the political and discursive struggles around and
against these delimitations of the domestic/work…) as well as methodological
(how/can domestic work be measured? What has been less focused on is the
obverse side – what happens when the domestic/work is not taken into account?
Not simply in terms of policy outcomes or discursive political norms about who
‘works’ and who doesn’t but in terms of the bodies, spaces, communities and
relationships that form the network of our everyday lives.  It is this aspect that I

19
address through examining two intersecting conceptual axes – depletion and/in
everyday political economy.

SMITA SAHGAL

Associate Professor, Department of History, Lady Sri Ram College for Women,
Delhi University

Dr. Sahgal completed graduation and post-graduation in History from St.

Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. She did her M.Phil on ‘Spread of Jainism
in Ancient India, with special reference to Mathura’ and her PhD on ‘Bull Cults in
North India; A socio-Religious Study upto 550 AD’ from University of Delhi.

She is currently engaged in a post-doctoral research project sponsored by Indian

council of Historical Research on ‘The institution of Niyoga in Early India’. She
has received awards on papers from Indian History Congress and has been
felicitated by the Romanian Embassy for promotion of Indo- European cultural
ties. She has numerous publicationsin different journals and books to her credit.
The topics range from gender studies to religious explorations within Jainism and
Brahmanism.

Abstract
Niyoga and the inheritance norms; Legal frameworks without the subjects’ voice
or choice.

The paper intends looking at the practice of niyoga or commissioned procreation

and its social and legal implications for a sonless widow/ wife in ancient and early
medieval India. The idea is to explore the normative dimensions of the practice;
its genesis, consolidation and eventual marginalization. The vantage chosen
is largely gendered even as the issues of caste and class would surface. Niyoga
[levirate] was an arrangement by which a widow or a wife of an impotent man
was made to cohabit with a member of husband’s family [generally the younger
brother, devara] or a brahman and the progeny was recognized as the son/heir of
the woman’s husband. It was a legally accepted practice that gave a sonless man
an heir who would inherit his property, perform ancestral rights and perpetuate
his lineage. Our point of enquiry is whether this kind of practice, legalized in the
dharmasutras, ever took a woman’s point of view in its reckoning. Did it bring her
some solace or turned out to be an exploitative way of controlling her sexuality?

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Did the woman have the right to reject it? Did the practice also have caste and class
angles to it? Who eventually stood to benefit from the practice and its eventual
fading away? Does the practice continue in oblique way even today? Does it have
any legal and social standing? We shall take up these issues for analysis in the
paper.

UMA NARAYAN

Professor of Philosophy, Vassar College

Professor Narayan holds the Andrew Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Vassar
College. She is currently working on issues of globalization and economic rights.

Abstract

The “empowerment” of poor women in Third World countries currently appears

to be a popular item on the agendas of many powerful institutions. Many of these
agendas appear very problematic if they are examined closely. I will address
a number of such “suspicious centerings” of the interests of poor Third World
women and raise questions about their import for contemporary feminism.

VASUKI NESIAH
Associate Professor of Practice, Gallatin School, NYU.

She teaches law and social theory, human rights and international legal studies.
Currently, her main areas of research include the law and politics of international
human rights and humanitarianism, with a particular focus on transitional justice. 
Her past work covered varied areas of critical international law, including the
politics of international humanitarian action, colonialism and self-determination,
the politics of memory, comparative constitutionalism and international feminisms.
She has taught in the International Relations and Gender Studies concentrations
at Brown University and the School of Public International Affairs at Columbia
University.   She also spent several years in practice at the International Center
for Transitional Justice where she worked on law and policy issues in the field of
post-conflict human rights.  Originally from Sri Lanka, she also engages on current
issues in Sri Lanka through journals, blogs and other fora. She completed her
BA in Philosophy and Political Science at Cornell University, her JD and SJD at
Harvard Law School.

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 Abstract
Transitional justice:  Choreographing values and value in global governance

This paper seeks to investigate the configuration of the ‘victim’ of human

rights catastrophe as a window into the transitional justice field and “the crisis
imagination”.   The visibility of the ‘victim’ in the TJ field is structured through
the interplay between icons and measures, between discourses and practices that
venerate the category of victimhood as the sacred on the one hand, and discourses
and practices that situate victims in the verification practices of governance
and social science on the other.  Truth commission procedures perhaps best
embody this duality in the structure of visibility laying emphasis on both the
iconic image of victims conveying a sacred truth through their testimonies, and
their incorporation into databases, surveys, indicators and other measurement
practices to enable a verifiable account regarding patterns of victimization, victim
priorities or the efficacy of such mechanisms.  These discourses and practices of
values and value are parallel intersecting technologies of truth - the normative
and the numerical construction of victim hood, the sacred and the profane, the
qualitative and the quantitative. Victims emerge in sanctification practices as
carriers of individual injury, telling depoliticized stories of personal experiences of
human rights violations.  Concomitantly, the turn to measurement in the everyday
practice of human rights focused work stages a different kind of depoliticization.
With measurement practices, areas that were once regarded as political are now
coded as expert knowledge; issues that were previously contested as ideological
are now legitimated as good governance.  Thus as sanctification practices frame
victims as icons that are above politics, measurement practices frame victims as
indices that are politically neutral.  The paper surfaces these frames of visibility
and their implications.

VINAY LAL

Professor, Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi

Professor Lal has taught history at UCLA since 1993. He writes widely on Indian
history and culture, Gandhi, American politics, the Indian diaspora, and the
politics of knowledge systems. His dozen books include Deewaar: The Footpath,
the City, and the Angry Young Man (HarperCollins, 2011); Political Hinduism:
The Religious Imagination in Public Spheres (ed., Oxford, 2009); Of Cricket,

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Guinness and Gandhi: Essays on Indian History and Culture (Penguin, 2005);
The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India (Oxford, 2003);
and Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy (Pluto
Press, 2002; rev. Indian ed., Sage, 2005). He has co-edited with AshisNandy three
books, including Fingerprinting Popular Culture: The Mythic and the Iconic in
Indian Cinema (Oxford, 2006).

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