Gendered (In)visibilities

Maria Framke is a historian of modern South Asia at Rostock University, Germany. Maria’s research and publications cover the history of international organizations, imperial and nationalist politics and humanitarianism, development and gender in the 20th century.Fritzi-Marie Titzmann is a scholar specializing in gender, media, and social movements, with a particular focus on contemporary South Asia. She holds a Ph.D. in South Asian Studies from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and has over 15 years of research and teaching experience.

“With her characteristic brilliance and perspicacity, Mary E. John makes a signal contribution to feminist scholarship in this book. Her genealogy of child marriage draws upon historical, comparative, and intersecting analytical frameworks. This deep and nuanced contextualization compels us to consider afresh what we had long assumed we knew about a familiar subject. Her argument about "compulsory marriage," which she introduces to reframe the discussion of child marriage, offers an important conceptual advance that will likely become a valuable new resource in the feminist toolkit. This is one of the most original and exciting feminist interventions to come along in a while.” — Mrinalini Sinha, Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of History, University of Michigan, USA“This elegantly incisive book by Mary E. John, one of India’s leading feminist scholars, challenges us to interrogate some of the myths of reason and progress that we complacently live by. Her object of study is public discourse and social policy on the issue of child marriage, a ‘social problem’ which, for close on two centuries, has been an object of attention by Indian social reformers, women’s movement activists, and latterly, in a global context, by international development agencies. In a tour de force, John decodes the intricacies of various data sets and the assumptions that drive them, to suggest that it is not child-marriage that is the problem for Indian women, but rather the ‘compulsory’ nature of marriage itself which must be the frame of reference for genuine change.” — Patricia Uberoi, Retired Professor, Institute of Economic Growth & Chairperson, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi, India

• Introduction: Gendered (In)visibilities. An Interdisciplinary Approach to Activism Part A: Historicising (In)Visibility 1) Rethinking Solidarities in Nationalist Struggles: A Case Study of South Africa and India 2) Gender, nationalism and student activism: female-only students' associations in colonial Bengal (late 1920s) 3) Hidden Histories: Krishnabai Nimbkar and the Question of Rural Development in India 4) Debating Patriarchy, Debating Feminism: Late 20th Century Telugu Discourse on the Women’s Question Part B: (In)Visible Modes of Contemporary Activism 5) Nuclear invisibilities: Feminised performativities of dissent in Koodankulam 6) Governing on the Margins: Gendered Processes of Invisibility and Women’s Political Activism in Rural Sri Lanka 7) The ‘Empowered’ mahila karyakarta: Gender and Party Politics in the Bharatiya Janata Party 8) Local Lens, Global Vision: South Asian Women Architects Pioneering Critical Regionalism