Feminist Pedagogy and Sociology for Emancipation in India

Drawing on ‘Feminist Pedagogies: From Pedagogic Romanticism to the Success of Authenticity’ (1988) by Angéline Martel (professor of Linguistics and head of the Culture and Societies Department at Teleuniversite, University of Quebec) and Linda Peterat (professor, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia), the paper states that feminist pedagogy seems like a contradiction – feminism suggests an alternative worldview and pedagogy in its conventional sense is meant to provide education for entry into a patriarchal system. 

Feminist pedagogy explicitly confronts divisions between the public and the private, reason and emotion, and legitimises personal experience as an area of academic scholarship.

Feminist pedagogies raise crucial questions about how knowledge has been/is constituted, by whom, for whom and for what purpose. Answers to these are sought through interrelations between personal experience, the subject area, and its social and political contexts.

In an Indian context, sociologists primarily trained in English, who don’t have a framework of indigenous feminist theoretical discourse, find it difficult to locate themselves amid contestations of castes, classes, patriarchies and communal identities.

Prof. Rege writes that privileges of the dominant class, caste, religion, region, race, and their  specificities by gender, have to be fleshed out in the classroom.  “Such exercises strive towards a dialogue in which the experience of Dalit women students are seen as relevant to understanding not only the situation of Dalit women, but also in grasping the situation of savarna women and indeed that of Dalit and savarna men. Our feminist pedagogies therefore have the complex task of analysing caste from the standpoint of Dalit women and class from the standpoint of working-class women, hindutva from the standpoint of minorities and heterosexuality from the standpoint of lesbians. Recognizing multiple subjects of knowledge and history requires that all our subjectivities be transformed.”

One impact of the 1960 to 1970 period of studies on ‘modernisation’ was that it invariably concentrated on the ‘role-conflict’ of middle-class working women. “In these studies, women remained encapsulated in their roles, while critiques of the family were side-lined as the sexual division of labour was naturalized,” writes Rege.

The sexual division of labour and caste-based division of labour are intermeshed – “there is a definite relationship between the position in caste hierarchy and the control over women’s labour. Any elevation in caste status leads to the withdrawal of women from productive processes outside the private sphere.” This, Professor Rege says, “is linked to the control over the sexuality of upper caste women and the ‘accessibility’ of the bodies of lower caste women…” This, in turn, “is seen as the ‘failure’ of lower caste men to control the sexuality of their women, seen as the root of their impurity.”

Through classroom discussions, the family emerges as a site of contestation, struggle and politics, and this provides a point of entry for deliberations on conceptualising ‘family’ and ‘household’ in state programmes and policies. The politics of family life in India, says Prof Rege, have been overlooked by sociologists.

She notes that in Maharashtra, the undergraduate and postgraduate curricula in Sociology emphasise introductory courses based on popular American textbooks, and courses on Indian society based largely on ‘indological’ writings. The number of students opting for Sociology as a major has declined because the course contents and quality of teaching are unable to sustain the interest of students.

Focus and Factoids by Vedika Inamdar.