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26th-27th January, 2023
Jal Vihar, IIT Bombay
(accessible to persons with physical disabilities)

Body Worlds:
Feminist Conversations
and Dis/agreements

The Workshop

The two-day workshop hosted by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay convenes scholars of diverse disciplinary persuasions to dwell on the “body”.

A salient concern for Indian feminisms, the body has been translated as art, histories, laws, technologies, mythologies and policies. The different meanings and practices assigned to the body have fermented serious differences and debates within contemporary feminisms.

The workshop on January 26 and 27 brings together a wide range of papers and a panel discussion that examine the body through different frames, approaches and analytic registers. Together, these  carry forward extant and emergent feminist conversations and dis/agreements.

                                 

The Project

Research abstracts were invited in the year 2022 to respond to the following provocations:

How do we understand the “choice” exercised by gendered beings as they alter/labour/contract their bodies within changing socio-economic landscapes? How do we reckon with their implication in extractive labour, unfree markets and oppressive ideals?

Should feminist initiatives invoke the State to secure rights and to institute reforms—regarding rape, personal laws, queer lives. . .? Do these inevitably cede ground to dominant structures?

 

How do we respond to the customary incorporation of “women’s empowerment” and “gender budgeting” in many social initiatives? How, also, do we reckon with provisions of welfare and incentivizing?

 

How do children encounter the body in school? What exists and grows in the shadow of the

standardized, textbook introduction of the body?

 

Are bar-dancers those condemned to repeat humiliating caste-chattel-labour? Or, are they

independent economic agents whose work continues to be unfairly and moralistically devalued and debased?

 

Does feminist work presume an able-ist subject and thereby produce exclusionary ideals and

practices?

 

What (again) is “sex” and “gender”? Should “sex” indeed be outstripped, so that “gender”

becomes the proper business of feminism? Should biology indeed be set aside so that the sociocultural can be properly attended to?

 

What of feminist procedures, spaces and institutions that have been put in place after long

struggle? Have they ensured nourishing habitats?

 

In a world where the body has become the platform for surveillance and disaster capitalisms

based on "data gluttony" and "data control" of States and corporations, what happens to the

experiencing gendered body? Does this body "matter" at all?

 

As the body gets recast in significant ways, how does it traverse old and emergent technologies, media, institutions, imaginaries, disciplines, methodologies and politics?

 

Select abstracts were developed into research papers, some of which were discussed and workshopped online in thematically clustered roundtables.

sharmila & Shivali Tukdeo

Art used on this website is work of the artist Louis Bourgeois from her multipart work 10 am is When You Come to Me (2006)

Schedule

DAY 1  :   January 26th, 2023
DAY 2  :   January 27th, 2023

8.45 am - 9.30 am

Introduction to the Workshop and Opening Remarks

Sharmila, Shivali Tukdeo


9.30 am – 10.40 am

Encountering the Maternal Body: Rethinking Criminal Law and Justice

Latika Vashist
Discussant: Ashley Tellis

10.40 am – 10.55 am: Tea Break

 

10.55 am - 12.05 pm

Subversion through Corporeality and Question of Ethics: Reading through the Experience of a Bar Dancer  

Asima Jena
Discussant: Angela Sebastian

 

12.05 pm - 1.15 pm

Racialized and Sexualized Labour: Experiences of Tangkhul Migrant Spa Workers in the National Capital Region

Thotwungphi S.
Discussant: Alagammai C.

 

1.15 pm - 2.15 pm: Lunch             

 

2.15 pm - 3.25 pm

Toxic Silence: Feminist Environmentalism and The Discourse on Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) in India

Angela Emily Sebastian
Discussant: Riya Ray


3.25 pm - 4.35 pm

Looking at Trauma through the Body: An Account of a Disabled Sexual Abuse Survivor

Garima
Discussant: Asima Jena

4..35 pm - 4.50 pm: Tea Break

4.50 pm - 6.20 pm

Panel Discussion: Body (in)Visible: Opening out Feminist Research

S. Anandhi, Girija K.P., Pooja Satyogi

 

9.00 am - 10.10 am

Re-thinking Sex/Gender/Sexuality

Ashley Tellis
Discussant: Mazha S. Muhammed


10.10 am - 10.25 am: Tea Break

10.25 am  - 11.35 am

Interrogating the Conceptualization of Selfhood and Body in the Debates on ‘Sex Work’ in India

Nikita Dhanania
Discussant: Thotwungphi S

 

11.35 am - 12.45 pm

Bodies That Matter, Bodies That Don’t: Understanding Bodies and Ethics in Medical Research

Riya Ray
Discussant: Taru Jain


12.45 pm-1.45 pm: Lunch

 

1.45 pm-2.55 pm

Problematizing a Singing Body: Indian Classical Music and the Visibility of the Female Body

Mazha S. Muhammed
Discussant: Latika Vashist

2.55pm - 4.05 pm

Can We Write in Feminist Ways? Reflections from Writing the Disabled Body

Alagammai C.
Discussant: Nikita Dhanania

4..05pm - 4.20 pm: Tea break

4.20 pm - 5.30 pm

Re-imagining the Body of an Ideal Customer of a FemTech Health Platform

Taru Jain
Discussant: Garima

5.30pm - 6.30 pm

De-briefing and way forward

Persons with disabilities who would like to request accommodations or have questions about  access may contact sharmila@iitb.ac.in in advance of the program. We will make every effort to secure provisions, subject to availability.

Organizing Team

Abhijeet Yadav is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at IIT Bombay. His research interests surround the themes of Historicity, Philosophy of History and Indian Historiography. 

Asif Mushtaq is a Doctoral Candidate of Sociology at IIT Bombay. His research interests are memory, gender (dis)ability, affect and space. Apart from this he is also interested in the audio-visual arts as a form of narrative. 

Atriya Dey is a doctoral candidate of Sociology in IIT Bombay. He specialises on urban planning, political economy, study of capitalism(s) and Marxian politics. Apart from that he also has personal experience of being a part of left progressive movements in many parts of India. 

Priya Sharma (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate under the joint supervision of sociology and philosophy units at HSS, IIT B where she critically analyzes the recent ban on commercial surrogacy in India by employing the lens of feminist care ethics and reproductive justice. Along with this, she is currently working on writing projects around critical midwifery studies, care in relief work, and decolonizing academia and runs a relief project around food and emergency needs called, URHope-Foodbank.

Priyam Mathur is a doctoral student of Philosophy at HSS, IIT Bombay. Her primary research interests are Phenomenology, Philosophy of the Body and Indian Philosophy

Abhiri Sanfui is a PhD scholar in HSS department of IIT Bombay.  She has done her Bachelor's and Master’s in English Literature fom Jadavpur University. Her area of interest is Dalit Literature and Ecofeminism.

Amarkant  is a research scholar in Philosophy at the HSS department. He is a Physics graduate and a former theatre practitioner. He is co-editor at gulmohur quarterly, an online literary magazine.  He has partially managed the art and design aspect of this workshop.

Maitreyi Redkar is a doctoral research scholar working in the Psychophysiology laboratory of the Humanities and Social Sciences Department. She is a clinical psychologist by profession and has done her dual degree planning and development.
Broadly, her research focuses  on understanding various psychological areas of menstruating women in India. Her current doctoral research on the psychological impact of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) which is multidisciplinary as it seeks to evaluate the condition from a psychological and cognitive neuroscientific in conjunction with gender studies and public health.

Sharmila teaches literature in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Her research inquiries tend to be wayward and vagrant. Much of her published work, however, tugs at the impulses of gender. She is the author of the book Scripting Lives: Narratives of ‘Dominant’ Women in Kerala. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2009.

Adarsh Priyadarshi is a research scholar in Philosophy at the HSS department. He is a graduate from Hindu College, University of Delhi. His primary research interests are Greek Philosophy, Phenomenology and Marxism. He is currently working on Plato's Politics to understand the philosophical ground of political ambitions.

Annesha Palit is a student pursing Masters by research in HSS, IIT Bombay. Hailing from Jamshedpur, she has done her Bachelor’s in English Literature from Calcutta University and her Masters in the same from Banaras Hindu University. When not sleeping or scribbling, she can be found enjoying music, doodling or traveling with her family.

Malvika Jayakumar  is a second year PhD student at the HSS department. Her project is based on the works of the Hindi author Rahul Sankrityayan. She attained her Bachelors and Masters in English Literature from Hans Raj College and St. Steephen's College, University of Delhi respectively. She is someone who loves the outdoors but can equally enjoy doing artwork and watching movies indoors.

Shivali Tukdeo is currently working with the education programme, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. Her primary academic work and interests revolve around education, especially the shifts in formal education in India. Her encounter with feminist theory and politics has been more circuitous than well-planned.

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