Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia

Providing a comprehensive overview of the study of gender in South Asia, this Handbook covers the central contributions that have defined this area and captures innovative and emerging paradigms that are shaping the future of the field. It offers a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives spanning both the humanities and social sciences, focussing on India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Now available in paperback, the Handbook brings together key experts in the field of South Asia and gender, women and sexuality. Chapters are organised thematically in five major sections:

• Historical formations of gender and the significance of colonialism and nationalism
• Law, Citizenship and the Nation
• Representations of Culture, Place, Identity
• Labour and the Economy
• Inequality, Activism and the State

This timely survey is essential reading for scholars who research and teach on South Asia as well as for scholars in related interdisciplinary fields that focus on women and gender from comparative and transnational perspectives.

Introduction Part 1: Historical Formations 1.Gendered Nationalism: From Women to Gender and Back Again?2. Construction of Gender in the Late nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century in Muslim Bengal: The writings of Nawab Faizunessa Chaudhurani and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain 3. Gender, Women and Partition: Literary Representations, Refugee Women and Partition Studies Part 2: Law, Citizenship and the Nation 4. Gender and Citizenship in India 5. Gender and Democratic Politics in Bangladesh 6. Law, Sex Work and Activism in India 7. The Supreme Court of India and Maintenance for Muslim Women: Transformatory Jurisprudence 8. Female Militancy: Reflections from Sri Lanka 9. The Political Economy of Moral Regulation in Pakistan: Religion, Gender and Class in a Postcolonial Context Part 3: Representations of Culture, Place, Identity 10. Gender, media and popular culture in a global India 11. Death and Family: Queer Archives of the Space Between 12. Women's Place-making in Santosh Nagar: Gendered constellations 13. Gender and property in neoliberal middle-class Kolkata: Of untold riches and unruly homes Part 4: Labor and the Economy 14. Global Governance Initiatives and Garment Sector Workers in Sri Lanka: Tracing its Gender and Development Politics 15. An Intersection of Marxism and Feminism among India’s Informal Workers: A Second Marriage? 16. Gendered Opportunity and Constraint in India’s IT Industry: The Problem of Too Much ‘Headweight’ 17. A Feminist Commodity Chain Analysis of Rural Transformation in Contemporary India 18. NGOs, State and Neoliberal Development in South Asia: The Paradigmatic Case of Bangladesh in a Global Perspective Part 5: Inequality, Activism and the State 19. Gender and Education in South Asia 20. Sex Ratios and Sex Selection in India: History and the Present 21. Dalit Women Between Social and Analytical Alterity: Rethinking the ‘Quintessentially Marginal’ 22. Feminism, Sexuality and the Rhetoric of Westernization in Pakistan: Precarious Citizenship 23. Mapping Women’s Activism in India: Resistances, Reforms and (Re)-Creation

Leela Fernandes is Glenda Dickerson Collegiate Professor of Women’s Studies and Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, USA. Her most recent book is an edited volume, Feminists Rethink the Neoliberal State: Inequality, Exclusion and Change. She is the author of Transnational Feminism in the United States: Knowledge Ethics and Power, India’s New Middle Class, Transforming Feminist Practice and Producing Workers. She is currently completing a book on water politics and the state in liberalizing India.