Feminist Perspective: Dube

and Rege
Dr. Asima Jena
Two points from Max Weber
• Before proceeding for Feminist challenge to Indian sociology, two points from Weber is relevant
here for discussion.
• 1-Weber’s hermeneutic methodology- the problem of understanding and interpretation - is part
of German’s “ideographic or historical school” which started with the aim to read Bible
independently from the priest.
• 2- In his discussion on “Hypergamy and bride price and dowry and female infanticide”, he
traced “hypergamy and bride price” to originate among the invading warrior groups and pointed
out that this practice later was also extended to castes closer to them like Jats, Bhat, Khatri,
Gujjar and Karwar.
• This point is still relevant in contemporary times (adverse female sex ratio), it was the main
topic in “towards equality”-1974 and continue to be feminist concern: the practice of bride-price
among these communities in Haryana, in Gujarat-Kutch region and Punjab where brides are
bought from impoverished regions like Odisha, West Bengal, Bihar, etc (Ravinder Kaur:
violence) and also from Kerala (Janaki Abraham on Tiyas)
Situating Sharmila Rege’s work on
“Sociology of Gender”:
• It is not written soon after the resurgence of feminist movement in India in 1970s which was
instrumental for enunciation of women’s studies centre (through ICSSR grant on the advisory
committee on women’s studies and in universities through, the UGC appointed standing committee
on women’s studies which enabled it to introduce the first sponsored programme of promoting
centres for women’s studies within the universities in 1985), but after the entry of dalit and Dalit
feminist standpoint, third-world feminism, etc.
• What does this mean?
• It had to interrogate from multiple themes/dimensions: not just feminist intervention/critique in/of
mainstream sociological knowledge i.e. shift from “malestream/androcentric sociology” (mainly
concerned with research on men and by implications with theories for men) to sociology of women
• but also how to engage with the question of “difference”- thus another shift- sociology of women to
sociology of gender- in order to focus on masculinity, sexual orientation, plurality, heterogeneity,
intersectionality, etc.
How “Sociology of women” shaped
sociological knowledge in India?
• Sociology of women: looking at social reality from women’s perspective and delineate sex and gender
distinction (gender is treated as a social structure and implies social character of the differences
between the sexes whereas sex implies the physiological differences- second wave feminism), etc.
• Ex: Karve, Dube, Uberoi, etc in the domain of research on family, marriage, employment, etc indicted
mainstream sociology for being androcentric, the hegemony of patriarchy.
• How? since it did not really discuss how women see/view family and marriage – whether a site of
freedom or violence and control, independent rights or protection by male kin, provide equal rights or
unequal rights - though women were visible.
• So women were absent as cognitive category and kept hidden from sociological gaze.
• Feminist sociologists underscored how her sexuality is controlled, body is mutilated and independent
rights are suppressed in the guise of protection and community and family honour.
• Ex: Leela Dube’s article “Seed and Earth” noted unequal relationships that are expressed through the
use of symbols in the descent -like seed sown in the soil- in order to underplay the significance of
women’s contribution to biological reproduction.
Infertility
• This is the reason why after separation and divorce, she cannot claim her rights on children- child belongs to the seed-
father and mother is just the nourisher and carries the seed on her womb like earth, etc for nine months, provide nutrition,
milk, etc in patrilineal kinship structure.
• “While tying her down to the supreme duty of motherhood, this symbolism is instrumental in denying her natural rights
over her children and in creating and sustaining an ideology in which strategic resources of both types- material and
human- remain in the hands of men.”
• Note, even if she is not assumed as the main contributor in reproduction, her identity is reduced to reproduction (even
Hindu marriage rituals too conveyed it for progeny, precondition for remain faithful to her husband and premium placed
on birth of sons)
• Since “fertility” assumed significance and valorised, thus infertile women face stigma with the expression “barren land”,
subject to divorce, disowning by family members, etc.
• Infertile men are alluded as “impotent” at the same time the expression of “seed” assumes relevance, thus, male kin
members are pressed into service for bringing off-spring, even Mahabharata/smritis contains reference to bringing a
substitute for the husband to contribute seed for the sake of obtaining progeny. Thus, if her husband is dead, impotent, it is
acceptable by the family to use the seed of his brothers, lineage mates or clans.
• (recent surrogacy law, 2017 is Brahminical in this sense which restricted commercial surrogacy, but allowed voluntary
surrogates from close relatives-so Vansh/lineage is important, this law also barred same-sex couple to hire surrogates)
Excluded from owning material and
productive resources
• How material resources lie at the hands of men?
• In her natal home she is treated as a “guest” who have to be handed over to other family, thus “transferable”
whereas her brothers or male children are considered as permanent member, “supporter of family”,
• thus property rights under Mitakshara and Dayabhaga system are inherited by male offspring- thus daughters
do not have share in ancestral property only given property as “gifts” during marriage by some landed castes.
(people have serious misgivings)
• When she moves to another family after marriage- “patrivocal”, again, property remains in the name of men.
Thus in the case of divorce or separation, women’s condition becomes precarious.
• This not only prevails in caste society but also in tribal society where patrilineal system is followed, even if
their land is communally owned.
• Similarly, feminist scholars asserted (Desai, Krishnaraj, Dube, etc) that while studying employment, critiqued
that mainstream sociologists looked at work from male’s lens- paid employment in market/public sphere, but
overlooked women’s work as non-paid worker in productive work as family labourer.
• and thus, women’s role in cultivation and other productive activities- animal husbandry, pottery, handloom,
brick-klin, bangle, sugar cane cutting, lace-making, etc is considered as supportive.
• These critiques and interventions were underpinned by feminist movement in 1970s and showed their
results in 1980s in the writings of feminist sociologists.
• According to Rege, this phase is “one-dimensional feminist disenchanting of sociology. The focus,
therefore, was on the underlining of the invisibility of women in sociology.”
• Point to be noted here that according to Rege, “women were visible/women’s issues were discussed” in pre-
institutionalization/professionalisation phase of Indian sociology that is prior to 1950 in the work of
Ghurye- on female sexuality, Wadia’s Ethics of Feminism (1923) is probably one of the first attempts in
sociology in India to explore the effects of feminist thought on marriage, motherhood, home life, education
and professions, SC Dube, Jotiba Phule, etc.
• She termed it as “unexpected zone”
• “Thus, the pre-institutionalization phase of the history of the discipline can be read as more than as just a
‘sociology of absences of women’.
• The task in sociology, unlike in history or economics or literature, was not that of making visible the
invisible women. The central importance accorded to the study of the family, marriage and kinship in
sociology had meant that women had been visible but their experiences had been ignored.”
• She explained how “visibility of women” was possible in pre-institutionalized phase?
• Attributed it to: A- inter-disciplinarity culture and stress on “value based research prevailed
in under the headship of Lucknow school of D.P.M.
• B- Liberal reformism: The agenda of the liberal reformists and revivalists of the nineteenth
century set the contours for the ‘woman in sociology’ in the cognitive structures of the
discipline.
• She also found limitations of the liberal reformist project and strengths in democratic
revolutionary tradition of Phule with regard to wone’s question.
• “Thus, space within the sociological discourse – liberal reformism- came to be granted either
to the woman in the ‘texts’ or the ‘middle-class woman’ in the context of modernization.
• Despite the study of caste having been almost synonymous with Indian sociology, Jotiba Phule
had to wait for a sociological analysis until Omvedt’s work (1976), and ‘Kulambini’ his
analysis of the differences among women still awaits one.”
• “Thus, it is the reformist concern with the qualities and domain of women of the middle
classes that instituted the savarna, middle-class woman as the object of the sociological
analysis of the status of women in India.”
• In precise term how did sociology of women brought change or expanded sociological
knowledge?
• Feminists sociologists in India underlined the significance of the social character of the
differences between the sexes over the physiological differences.
• In a sharp critique of the acceptance of psychological ideas and conservatism in sociology,
they outlined the penetration and persistence of the feminine mystique and the maternal
myth in the academy and the labour market.
• Legal Intervention which also found place in academic writings: Institutional change in
matters of childcare (“maternity benefit act”), “equal remuneration Act”, education and
residence were marked as a prerequisite for the goal of sexual equality.
Post-Modern/third-world Feminism or
linguistic turn
• If this marked as one significant shift, another shift was to reflect on interlocking forms of oppression.
Thus, Rege showed how the use of gender as a conceptual category along with class, race, sexual
orientation, ethnicity and caste has expanded the horizons of sociology. Gender is seen as one of
realization of the intrinsic linkages between gender and other matrices of structural inequalities.
• In the global theoretical paradigm since 1980s, the central category ‘woman’ in feminist theorization
has come to be challenged as a homogenized notion. Differences arise among feminists over whether
one considers these structures in the singular or the plural. The issue of race was central in propelling
these debates on gender as multiple structures of power.
• Result: we moved from sex and gender distinction where gender is regarded as social construction to
gender fluid or sex-gender continuum (Butler) and gender as multiple structures of power.
• Trends in postmodern feminism have assumed a nominalist position and have challenged the use of
the category ‘woman’ as essentialist.
• Several trends in black and Third-World feminism are different in that they had sought to historicize
the differences of sexual orientation, class, nation, race and caste that exist between women.
• The postmodernists argued that feminist goals could not be conceptualized in terms of the needs and
interests of white, middleclass women.
• Ex: Mohanty using Foucault’s discursive approach in “under western eyes” speaks about
recolonization of third world woman and white woman’s blindness to penetration of capitalism through
feminist rhetoric and language of “poverty and illiteracy and lack of agency of third-world woman”,
• (population control program which was promoted by India state to control “poverty” among Muslim,
Dalit and Adivasi women instead of tackling poverty which itself curtail births in poor households is a
case in point)
• thus she cautioned against “universalizing women” and speaking on behalf of third-world
woman’s interest. (Spivak too discussed on similar lines in “can subaltern speak”- epistemic
violence)
• With the linguistic turn in theory, gender theorization has shifted the focus from material to discursive
structures. In such discourses on gender, femininity and masculinity have no ontological foundations
and is conceived as relational and contextual.
Black Feminism
• Another related turn is emergence of Black feminism which too questioned the essentialization and
universalization of woman in feminist theory. Black feminist sociologists like P. H. Collins underlined
the ways in which different epistemologies promote the interests of different groups and how
oppositional knowledge is subtly suppressed.
• There has been a shift to the category of gender as against women, not only because it allows a
relational analysis but also because it allows for an analysis of interlocking structures of oppression,
namely, race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc.
• Dalit feminism as said earlier, drew its intellectual resource from these two theoretical traditions-
third-world feminism and black feminist standpoint.
• This was one of the reasons for her to name it as sociology of gender instead of sociology of women
and makes it more inclusive.
• “Feminists, especially Third-World, black and Dalit feminists, have underlined the dangers of
presuming a set of common meanings for the category women. They have argued that the category
woman universalizes and homogenizes the experiences of white, middle-class and upper-caste women.
Why Sociology of Gender?
• On the other hand, the use of the category gender allows for the analyses of differences of race, class,
caste, nation and sexual orientation between women. The use of the category woman assumes
commonality between all women and can at best allow the analysis of the differences among women
in an additive or add-on manner.”
• “In the analysis of a caste-based society, for instance, such an assumption of commonality amounts to
a reiteration of the normative status of the upper-caste women. Often the commonality between
women is assumed on the basis of their experiences of victimhood as ‘women’ in a patriarchal society.
• Such an assumption not only universalizes the concept of patriarchy but also argues as if the
oppression of caste and class is located in some ‘non-woman’ part of Dalit women.
• The use of the category gender allows for an analysis of the interlocking structures of oppression and,
in fact, goes beyond the analysis of the differences among women by underlining the gendered nature
of caste and class oppression. In the academic sphere it establishes gender as an axis of social
stratification while in the political sphere it underlines the inevitability of gender as a concern for all
emancipatory struggles.”
Placing Leela Dube’s work “who gains from
matriliny”
• Then this is also the reason why Leela Dube’s work is pertinent here to reflect: she too while discussing about “work”,
kinship structure, property rights, etc, her emphasis was on diversity- thus she focused on matrilineal kinship system to
patrilineal and intra-kin marriage prevalent in south-India and among Muslim communities of India and Pakistan and
again also diversities in each of these in region-wise and religion-wise.
• Flexibility in Islam: Islam in South-Asia has shown a lot more flexibility and adopted to local culture. Through
basing her work on matrilineal system in Lakshadweep, she showed how there is absence of purdah system,
men are not in triple-talaq, women exercise agency, etc.
• Through Leela Dube’s work, we can substantiate Rege’s point of how feminist critique enhanced/enriched
sociological knowledge.
• Her study did not feminize/stereotyped the Muslim community by centreing on the ‘problems of Muslim women’,
namely talaq, purdah and lower rates of education’. In contrast, she discussed how women Taravad system here
exercised autonomy, not under veil, had land-rights, could divorce their husbands on the charge of infidelity and their
infidelity does not become the ground for divorce, husbands have the provision of duolocal residence, if women go for
lover marriage against the wish of their mother and maternale-unclde they do not lose land-rights, how women’s
contribution in reproduction and production is valued, etc.
• Patricia Uberoi (1993) observed that in mainstream anthropological studies on Muslims community “differentiation
seems to cut across sexual hierarchy only along communal lines”. Leela Dube’s work is a departure.
• Having justified the turn to sociology of gender, she also noted the contested strand among
feminists to retain “sociology of women”.
• “The shift from women to gender has been viewed by some as a replacement of the study of
sexual inequality with the study of the differences between the sexes (Evans 1990). They make a
case for the continuing usefulness of the term ‘woman’ for analysis as against the category of
gender. The category ‘gender’ is seen as diverting the focus from specific issues concerning
women both in the political and academic sphere.”
• Nevertheless, Rege’s aim was to “Engendering sociology” means interrogating the processes by
which sociological discourse was gendered but putting forth feminist reflexive understanding of
sociology as emancipatory.
• “Hence, for those of us committed to reflexive modernity, the task of engendering is one of
underlining the ways in which sociological discourse is patriarchal, middle class, Hindu and
Brahamanical. The uphill task is of reconceptualizing basic categories of analysis, once the
experiences of the marginalized have been brought to centre.”
 On Feminist methodology
• 1- The intellectual issues, are not divorced from the political in doing sociology of gender.
• Across the world, the gender politics of second-wave feminism- with the slogan “personal is
political” has been intertwined with the introduction of the concept of gender into the
professional work of sociologists. (imperatives for new theorization is from politics)
• 2- Feminist scholarship has been largely interdisciplinary.
• She commented that gender studies are marginalized in social sciences except in ‘enclaves of
women’s studies’.
• “Feminist scholarship in India is too dispersed (across disciplines) and marginalized for one stage
to directly build upon the other. At the organizational level in the academia, gender studies exists
as a semi-separate space of ideas and research and not as a convincing interdisciplinary field.
• Feminist sociologists, therefore, have to travel between gender studies, the zone of exclusion,
which allows greater expression of feminist ideas and practices, and the zones of inclusion within
sociology.”
Feminism in academic borderlands
• Feminist sociologists more often than not are located on the academic borderlands. Academic
borderlands are the territories that lie between the academy and activism, sociology and gender studies,
metropolitanism and regionalism, disciplinary boundaries and identities and interdisciplinary
capacities.
• Nevertheless ‘borderlands’ are themselves a contested zone as they are coinhabited by people of
different castes, classes, languages, ethnicity, sexual orientation and politics. The feminist borderlands
have themselves come under sharp scrutiny as the identical interests of all women and unified notions
of female subordination have come to be challenged.
• This is important because in the academy, these socially contested borderlands are epistemological
borderlands, as they constitute the interface between different claims to knowledge. The claims to
knowledge of all ‘others’ on the margins—Dalits, Bahujans, working class and minority communities
—are intertwined and efforts to transform sociology require more dialogue on and across the
borderlands.
• In order to explain marginalisation of feminist knowledge, it important here is to discern how
malestream sociology reacted to this challenge?
• Feminist critiques of the disciplines in the 1980s began to underline the wide gap between the
everyday worlds of women and sociological knowledge. (already discussed in terms “androcentrism of
Indian sociology”)
• What explains this “androcentrism” after 1950s- after institutionalization phase that feminists indicated
sociology to render women “invisible”?
• She argued that interestingly when the institutional expansion began in 1952, as the
knowledge/methods of sociologists and social anthropologists became ‘usable’ by the state,
sociologists were required to outline the social determinants and consequences of state-sponsored
development- CDP, Ford Foundation, etc.
• This period of visibility for the sociologist saw an estrangement of the discipline from history,
economics and political science. This phase of institutionalization comes almost close to what feminist
critiques conceive as of invisibility of women in the discipline. The earlier voices on theoretical
pluralism and myth of value-free social sciences were almost lost under the burden of
institutionalization and the paradigmatic axioms of structure functionalism and research technology. So
also invisibility of women under functionalist/modernization paradigm.
• What needs to be explained here is when women’s studies centres were established, what kind of interaction it had with
sociology?
• According to her, they remained separated.
• “The twin origins of women’s studies, from the movement and from the top by the UGC, without much interaction with
the university authorities, has posed several conceptual and operational problems.
• Thus the increased interest in research on women often translated into studies on dowry, unmarried mothers,
modernization among women, female criminality, problems of female folk artistes, employment among Brahman women
and impact on family patterns and domestic servants in urban centres.
• A careful look at the subtitles of the theses completed during this period reflects the frame of the research question.
Studies on the education and employment of women are subtitled ‘a study of social change’ or ‘modernization and
impact on family patterns’. While studies on dowry, divorce, unmarried mothers, folk artistes are framed within the study
of a social problem, the post-expansion phases in the development of the discipline, especially the late 1970s and 1980s,
did bring women back into visibility. However, the legacy of the earlier phase continues, in terms of limits set on
questions that are asked on what counts as proof and methods to generate knowledge.”
• Dominant framework was Parsonian which excludes the possibility of any analysis of the source of gender inequality in
the public and the private spheres. Thus, a concern with gender disparities in socialization ends on a plea for an
attitudinal change while those concerning rural women prescribe ‘modernization’ as a solution.
• This apparent lack of interpenetration of sociology and the women’s movement is further borne out by the near
absence of sociological analyses in the women’s movement.”
• Rege discussed another problem and thus it is related to the extent of permeability of feminism in Indian sociology.
• She argued that if on one hand the challenges posed by feminist scholarship and the women’s movements to these
received frameworks in the sociology of caste, family, kinship, marriage, work and stratification have been well
analysed, these were mainly inter-disciplinary in nature.
• “And in a sense, therefore, outside the purview of the typical student of sociology prior to introduction of courses on
sociology of women.”
• Interdisciplinary feminist challenges, if taken note of, are often ‘disciplined’ in the thesis- purity in maintaining
boundaries in sociology.
• Implications: Strategic exclusions/inclusions of the ‘feminist challenge’ have to be managed in order to avoid the
perennial questions about the sociological nature of the content and methodology. An engagement with the issue
being studied is met with the reminder of the divide between the diverse interest in the ‘social’ of the activist and the
sociologist in the ‘social’.
• Interdisciplinary feminist contributions may be incorporated in the description of the problem while the explanatory
frame has to be ‘sociological’.
• Thus, boundaries of ‘good sociology’ are drawn around general laws, scientific method and a
segmentalizing of human reality.
• The core of the discipline is sustained through the taken-for-granted ways of perceiving social reality—
despite an expansion in the subject matter— often to include the marginalized subjects. The marginalized,
be they women, Dalits, adivasis or the labouring classes, despite their inclusion in the substantive areas,
remain on the periphery of the cognitive structures of the discipline.
• She quoted Hegde “The intellectual and practical base of the core is sustained through several
dichotomies: social/political, social world/knower, reality/knowledge, objectivism/subjectivism, book
view/field view, macro/micro, all of which firmly keep out praxeological issues.”
• Intellectually, the centre coheres more than the margins occupied by several ‘others’ engaged in a critique.
• Further, these critiques from the several ‘others’ on the margins often exclude each other in that they
present the classic case of sexless caste/class and the classless/casteless gender. Despite this apparent
coherence at the centre, there has been an anxiety about the margins and loss of certainty. Articulations of
feminification of theory (Gupta 1995), claims of ‘balkanization of sociology’ and ‘meritocracy’ critiques
of Mandal (Beteille 1997) are only some of the cases in point.
• Crisis debate in Indian sociology that started from Das and Beteille.
• The crisis is conceived as one of protocols of learning (Das 1993) and irreverence
for tradition, and the sociologist’s ambition to be an ‘agent of social change’
(Beteille 1997).
• This is challenged by a more heightened sensitivity to the history of the growth and
teaching of sociology in India. The crisis then is conceived as one of paradigms or
one of the usability and lack of reflexivity (Deshpande and Rege).
• There have been three broad responses to the feminist critiques of the discipline:
inclusion, separatism and reconceptualization.
• While the first kind of response integrates women into the cognitive structures of
the discipline, it leaves the assumptions of the mainstream discipline unchallenged.
Summary

• The second response, the separatist position, argues for sociology of women from a woman’s standpoint. All women are
seen as sharing a common position derived from their marginalization and exploitation in a patriarchal society. The effort
is to conceptualize the social world based on the experiences of women. Such a position not only leaves the mainstream
unchallenged but also in a reverse way reiterates the division of women to experience and men to theory. In terms of
making a difference to the academe too, separatism can only lead to ghettoization of feminist sociological knowledge.
• The third position of reconceptualization seeks to move beyond a filling in of gaps and separatist knowledge. It seeks to
integrate feminist challenges to the discipline in ways that lead to a reconceptualization of the sociological categories.
From such a position, then, the project is not one of mere inclusion of women but of challenging some of the taken-for-
granted dichotomies like public vs private or domestic vs paid work. Each of these positions may be seen as employing
the different strategies in feminist theory.
• The first position of inclusion proposes to move towards a non-sexist sociology through the inclusion of women. The
second proposes a strategy of reversals, the reworking of sociological knowledge from the standpoint of women, thereby
moving towards a particularity of women’s sociology. The third position of reconceptualization often operates through a
strategy of displacement, so that deconstructive techniques may be employed to challenge accepted meanings.
• Nevertheless, displacement alone may not be an adequate basis for reconceptualization, which is an on-going and uphill
struggle.