The Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia research project (coordinated by Zubaan and supported by the International Development Research Centre) brings together, for the first time in the region, a vast body of knowledge on this important – yet silenced – subject. Six country volumes (one each on Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and two on India) comprising over fifty research papers and two book-length studies detail the histories of sexual violence and look at the systemic, institutional, societal, individual and community structures that work together to perpetuate impunity for perpetrators.

In this collection of essays on Sri Lanka the authors – activists, lawyers, academics, journalists – look back at Sri Lanka’s long and intense armed conflict during which women and men were sexually brutalized, assaulted, tortured and disappeared. They examine not only the rampant sexual violence during the conflict period, and the impunity enjoyed by its perpetrators, but focus also on women’s struggles for survival, their interactions with community leaders and their navigation of society’s expectations, their understanding of, and access to justice. Essay after essay argues compellingly for the need to stop treating survivors of sexual violence as victims and to start seeing them as potentially powerful agents of change.

The writers highlight a hitherto unaddressed aspect of sexual violence: that of the structures that enable impunity on the part of perpetrators, be they security personnel and paramilitary forces, members of armed rebel groups, gangs, local politicians and police or ordinary citizens including close family members.

They demonstrate how impunity for perpetrators is both a failure of the formal justice process and a product of individual, community and social conditions and indeed the choices that victims and families often make, which promote silence over truth. At the end of more than a quarter century of conflict that has left some 100,000 dead, 50,000 women-headed households struggling to survive, and created countless victims and survivors of sexual violence, the calls for justice can no longer be ignored.

Winner of the Joan Kelley Memorial Prize in Women's History

A huge international controversy followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an expose written by American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country's child wives. The book was translated into more than a dozen languages, and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Mrinalini Sinha traces the controversy surrounding Mother India, explaining how the uproar became a catalyst for far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India.

Mrinalini Sinha is Associate Professor of History and Women's Studies at Penn State University.

Knowing Our Rights is designed as a tool for activists engaged in lobbying and advocacy related to Muslim women's rights within the family, at the policy level and in communities. It covers twenty-six topics relevant to marriage and divorce, including the status of children (paternity and adoption) and child custody and guardianship. It is unique in providing a user-friendly, cross-comparative analysis of the diversities and commonalities of laws and customs across the Muslim world. This handbook is an essential resource for those taking a critical and questioning approach to rights, laws, and constructions of womanhood in Muslim countries and communities and beyond.

Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) is an international support network formed in 1984, in response to situations that required urgent action, related to Islam, laws and women. Starting as an Action Committee, WLUML evolved into an international network of information, solidarity and support.

Inclusive Citizenship seeks to go beyond the intellectual debates of recent years on democratization and participation to explore a related set of issues around changing conceptions of citizenship. People’s understandings of what it means to be a citizen go to the heart of the various meanings of identity, including national identity, political and electoral participation, and rights. The researchers in this volume come from a wide variety of societies, including the industrial countries in the North, and they seek to explore these difficult questions from different angles. Themes include: Citizenship and Rights, Citizenship and Identity, Citizenship and Political Struggle and the policy implications of substantive notions of citizenship.

Naila Kabeer is Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and a member of the Poverty and Social Policy Research Team. Her research interests include gender, population and poverty issues. Her recent books include The Power to Choose: Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka and Reversed Realities.

Jill M Bystdzienki is Director of Women's Studies and Professor of Sociology at Iowa State University.

Joti Sekhon is Professor of Sociology at Greensboro College, where she is also the coordinator of the International Studies Programme. She is the author of Modern India.

Patriarchy asserts men are superior to women

Feminism clarifies women and men are equal

Queerness questions what constitutes male and female

Queerness isn’t only modern, Western or sexual, says mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik. Take a close look at the vast written and oral traditions in Hinduism, some over two thousand years old, and you will find many overlooked tales, such as those of Shikhandi, who became a man to satisfy her wife; Mahadeva, who became a woman to deliver a devotee’s child; Chudala, who became a man to enlighten her husband; Samavan, who became the wife of his male friend, and many more . . .

Playful and touching—and sometimes disturbing—these stories, when compared with their Mesopotamian, Greek, Chinese and Biblical counterparts, reveal the unique Indian way of making sense of queerness.

On September 1, 1995, Tibetan nationalism and international feminism cam together in front of a global audience when nine exiled Tibetan women staged a demonstration at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. From a Tibetan perspective, the women created history by becoming the first Tibetans ever to hold a protest on Chinese soil. This book traces the history of organized political resistance by Tibetan women over the 40-year period leading up of the Beijing Conference. It describes and analyses the development of the Tibetan Women's Association, the mass women's organization of the Tibetan Exile Community and in particular the impact of feminism on it. It looks at at the overlaps and tensions between nationalism and feminism, and examines how both can be constructed in exile. In doing so, the book raises questions of belonging and representation, of change and permanence, of political expediency and idealism. Overall, it provides a unique insight into the nature of Tibetan Nationalism and its interaction with international forces and movements.

In The Sexual Life of English, Shefali Chandra examines how English became an Indian language. She rejects the idea that English was fully formed before its life in India or that it was imposed from without. Rather, by drawing attention to sexuality and power, Chandra argues that the English language was produced through conflicts over caste, religion, and class. Sentiments and experiences of desire, respectability, conjugality, status, consumption and fashion, came together to create the Indian history of English. The language was shaped by the sexual experiences of Indians and by native attempts to discipline the normative sexual subject. Focusing on the years between 1850 and 1930, Chandra scrutinizes the English-education project as Indians gained the power to direct it themselves. She delves into the history of schools, the composition of the student bodies, and disagreements about curricula, the way that English-educated subjects wrote about English and debates in English and Marathi popular culture. Chandra shows how concerns over linguistic change were popularly voiced in a sexual idiom, how English and the vernacular were separated through the vocabulary of sexual difference, and how the demand for matrimony naturalized the social location of the English language.

This book focuses on feminist research methodology, exploring and analysing its constituting methods, theory, ontology, epistemology and ethics and politics, as well as the significance of the subjectivity of the researcher in research issues relating to women, gender and feminism in Sri Lanka. The book examines ways of meaning-making for  political, ideological and social change, and constructs an example of feminist research praxis.

Using this South Asian country as a case study, the author looks at the means by which researchers in this field inhabit, engage with and represent the multiple realities of women and society in Sri Lanka. In analysing what constitutes feminist research methodology in a transitional country, the book links local research practices with Western feminist approaches, taking into account the commonalities, distinctions and specificities of working in a South Asian context.

With an emphasis on general issues and debates in global feminist theory and methodology, the book explores the issues of reflexivity, standpoint, gender, women’s agency, empiricism, and the feminist politics of Marxism and democracy, positivism, induction, deduction, post-modernism and postcolonialism.

Engaging with and re-conceptualising three traditionally different types of research — women’s studies, gender studies and feminist studies — Feminist Research Methodology provides a framework for researching feminist issues. Applicable at both local and global levels, this original methodological framework will be of value to researchers working in any context.

At various levels, from the city to the institutions and from the neighbourhood to the dwelling, the ideal and the real about the social relationship between men and women is expressed in the built form. Cultural rules govern the use of space and codes regulate behaviour between genders.

This book examines the role of women as consumers and creators of the built space and focuses particularly on India and parts of South Asia. The essays included here explore the gender perspective from various angles. They cover a wide range of issues such as domesticity and home, women labourers and construction work, the practice of architecture, education in general and in schools of architecture, women and leisure as well as women's relationship to the public sphere and housing in the vernacular mode.

The last few decades have witnessed growing theoretical and practical concerns with intersections between violent conflict and development. Links between poverty and natural resources have been minutely explored, and attention has also been given to how state collapse and bad governance have contributed to violent conflict. However, gender relations and ideologies have often been overlooked in theorization of these interconnections, as well as in designing development strategies meant to mend the devastating impact that war leaves on a society.
This book looks at the intersections between development practice and violent conflict from an explicit gender perspective and situates the fields of inquiry within a global condition of neo-liberal economy and militarism. Using the notions of femininity and masculinity as analytical tools, contributors question theoretical, political and policy approaches pertaining to specific development strategies in times of prolonged violent conflict, transitions to peace, and post-conflict periods. They further analyse various social, cultural, economic and political processes and relations of power that impact upon different groups of women, men and children in the contexts of militarization and violence.

Dubvravka Zarkov is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. She works on gender, sexuality, ethnicity and violent conflict. With Cynthia Cockburn she has co-edited The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping, on experiences in Bosnia and the Netherlands. Her book The Fe/Male Body and the Productive Power of Violence: On `Media War’ and `Ethnic War’ in Former Yugoslavia, is forthcoming.

In this creative, ethnographic and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption and circulation of tea. Allowing personal, scholarly and artistic voices to speak in turn, the author discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, post/colonial and now neofeudal conditions. A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own "decolonisation" as a third-world feminist anthropologist.

PIYA CHATTERJEE is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of California, Riverside, USA

_Feminist Subversion and Complicity_ interrogates a specific form of feminist practice, that which has involved engaging with state and international institutions to insert gender knowledge in their development interventions. Bringing together contributions from eight feminists located in very different kinds of institutions and spaces from Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India, this book is the outcome of a deeply reflexive process to produce a critique from within of this present day feminist practice. An array of experiences and encounters are scrutinised from bringing feminist perspectives to governmental projects on education, health, and legal reform to transformations in the discourses and practices of women’s movements and feminisms as they encountered developmentalisms. The writers show that feminist politics is not merely assimilated in governmental projects but that it interrupts these projects even as it is assimilated; a feminist politics in which complicity is often a subversive activity, is destabilizing and contesting of meaning.