Gender Dynamics through the Feminist Lens

Nivedita Menon’s Seeing Like a Feminist offers us the opportunity to ask critical questions about gender, gendered realities and their role in society, especially as a reader within India’s patriarchal system. Through the reading of this text and an integrated analysis of the contemporary events sampled in the book, an attempt shall be made to raise our awareness on the experiences of women and the multiple ways in which gender interacts with class, religion, caste, nationality and other social identites. Through the ‘feminist lens’, as suggested by the author, we are all at once the cause and the consequence of the society, and are constantly questioning these.

How this course works

The participants can initiate their entry into the text on their own, prior to the Crash Course, but the programme will start with the basics, with a presentation of the historical and political background of Menon’s reflection, before undertaking a close reading of the text in the sessions.

This course, like all programmes at IST, is designed in view of dynamic exchanges between the instructor and the participants ; therefore interjections, questions, comments and alternative interpretations are invited and encouraged throughout the session, while an interactive time is kept specifically at the end of each study session.