Dissident Friendships

Elora Halim Chowdhury is Associate Professor and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston. Elizabeth Philipose is an independent scholar and former Associate Professor in the International Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach.

"Elora Halim Chowdhury and Liz Philipose's dazzling collection invites readers to consider the politics of feminist friendships, alliances, and collaborations. The volume explores the powerful ways that we can be transformed by our connections with others, and urges a new attention to feminist friendships as sites of generosity and empathy, alliance and resistance. Chowdhury and Philiopose's volume reminds us that friendship is fraught terrain, that we encounter each other across borders and boundaries of multiple kinds, and that the language of friendship can be co-opted by discourses of neoliberalism and imperialism. Yet their contributors urge us to continue to dream of the promise of connection, consciousness, and transformation that dissident friendships make possible."--Jennifer Nash, author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography  "Rejuvenating our expectations of the most commonplace of human relations, Dissident Friendships challenges us to politicize that which is either overlooked or dismissed by more mainstream academic investigations. The intricate, and compassionate, analyses of friendship presented in these pages leave us renewed and provide an energizing vision for Gender Studies scholarship, social transformation and productive solidarities."--Shefali Chandra, author of The Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India  "Dissident Friendships is a significant transdisciplinary intervention that engages seriously with the meanings and possibilities of transformative feminist praxis in the face of the contradictions and complicities produced by neoliberalism, militarism, imperialism, humanism, and peace-building initiatives. Together, the contributors not only advance critical conversations about the work of affect in transnational solidarities and alliances; they also grapple in rich ways with the theoretical, methodological, and political complexities that are co-constitutive of the labor of dreaming, living, sustaining, and remaking epistemic friendships and communities across borders."--Richa Nagar, author of Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism

• CoverTitleCopyrightContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPART ONE: PRAXIS OF FRIENDSHIP1. Epistemic Friendships: Collective Knowledge-Making through Transnational Feminist Praxis2. Meditations on Friendship: Politics of Feminist Solidarity in EthnographyPART TWO: GENDER, NATION, SOLIDARITY3. Bridging the Divide in Feminism with Transcultural Feminist Solidarity: Using the Example of Forging Friendship and Solidarity between Chinese and U. S. Women4. For Sister or State? Nationalism and the Indigenous and Bengali Women's Movements in Bangladesh5. Solidarity through Dissidence: Violence and Community in Indian CinemaPART THREE: NEOLIBERALISM, AGENCY, FRIENDSHIP6. Kinship Drives, Friendly Affect: Difference and Dissidence in the New Indian Border Cinema7. The Space Between Us: Reading Umrigar and Sangari in the Quest for Female Friendship8. Who Are "We" in the Novel?PART FOUR: FRIENDSHIP ACROSS BORDERS9. A Spirit of Solidarity: Transatlantic Friendships among Early Twentieth-century Female Peace Activists (Wilpfers)10. The Dissidence of Daily Life: Feminist Friendships and the Social Fabric of DemocracyContributorsIndex