Articles by Mary E John

This paper situates the trajectories of feminism and women's rights in a history of thought spanning the 19th century to the present. It offers an alternate mode of engagement with the perceived problem of the dependency of the "East" on "Western" epistemologies and theories. Allowing for power-laden relationships between places and peoples, it argues that attention should focus on the modes in which concepts are made to work and provide insight, rather than on their "purity" in relation to an ascribed point of origin. This is demonstrated through the three epistemes that have broadly characterised the "women's question" in a comparative frame - the colonial, the national and the post-national. Feminism in India is thus mobilised for generating conceptual frames that are good to think with, whether within the nation or beyond.

Seeing Like a Feminist by Nivedita Menon (New Delhi: Zubaan and Penguin India), 2013; pp xii + 252, Rs 295.

The rapidly changing urban scenario seems to have important implications for gendering governance in Kerala. Thus, besides the different histories mediated by caste and community, the spatial location of women leaders in local governance appears to be of central importance in shaping their agency. This article which is based on the research about women leaders in local governance in Kerala in 2005-10 explores the extent to which success in local governance allowed these women entry into politics and gave them a greater presence within the public life. Generally it is seen that successful women leaders are often the bearers of a specific form of power that has been historically associated with the deployment of sentiment and affect, and ideal femininity, and that such power is understood to be crucial to local governance as well. However, an entirely different picture emerged from this study on women leaders of urban governance. Besides gentle power, successful women attribute their success equally to knowledge - of official norms and procedures.

The much-awaited provisional results of Census 2011 bring the news that the child sex ratio (0-6 years) has declined further from 927 to 914 girls for every 1,000 boys, due to a widening of the circle of daughter aversion, especially across western and central India. But in all the monitoring to correct this "imbalance" what place is there for a genuine engagement with the life chances of girls in diverse contexts?