Saraswati Raju – författare

Women's work is central to the social and economic aspirations of the countries of South Asia. Their contribution to agriculture, industry and services is critical. However, planners and policy makers frequently ignore women's economic roles, drawing simplistic conclusions from inadequate data. Women and Work in South Asia provides a cross-cultural perspective on research on women's work in South Asia. Integrating macro and micro analysis, Asian and Western contributors analyse the inadequacies of official statistics and explore, through case studies, the cultural and socio-economic position of women at work in the region.

Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentric discipline of geography. While recent contributions to feminist geography have challenged this, in India the engagement of geographers with gender, by being conservative in its choice of focus and orthodox in methodology, has been unable to destabilise the established disciplinary order. However, with younger scholars becoming increasingly interested in studying gender in geography, novel and innovative methods that include combinations of quantitative and qualitative analyses, visual sources and in-depth case studies are being tried out and accepted in geography despite its masculine legacy.This pioneering study brings together Indian geographers’ contributions to understanding gender, and through them, seeks to enrich the discipline of geography. It engages with the recent ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences, which has reclaimed the explanatory power of space and place in social theory that had been nearly lost to deconstructive postmodernist scholarship. The volume draws entirely from the Indian scholarship, showcasing contextualised knowledge production, but hopes to initiate a a dialogue with scholars elsewhere working with feminist methodologies.

Until the 1970s gender had been invisible in analyses of social space and place in the androcentric discipline of geography. While recent contributions to feminist geography have challenged this, in India the engagement of geographers with gender, by being conservative in its choice of focus and orthodox in methodology, has been unable to destabilise the established disciplinary order. However, with younger scholars becoming increasingly interested in studying gender in geography, novel and innovative methods that include combinations of quantitative and qualitative analyses, visual sources and in-depth case studies are being tried out and accepted in geography despite its masculine legacy.This pioneering study brings together Indian geographers’ contributions to understanding gender, and through them, seeks to enrich the discipline of geography. It engages with the recent ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences, which has reclaimed the explanatory power of space and place in social theory that had been nearly lost to deconstructive postmodernist scholarship. The volume draws entirely from the Indian scholarship, showcasing contextualised knowledge production, but hopes to initiate a a dialogue with scholars elsewhere working with feminist methodologies.

This volume examines the role of women workers who are joining the workforce in urban India. Employment opportunities have opened up and are constantly expanding for women, but this book interrogates whether their working status is breaking gender stereotypes or reaffirming them. It argues that whether women are working in offices or from home, contributing to the IT sector or labouring as petty producers, they are unable to break out of the gendered codes that place them at the lower rungs of the occupational ladder. More importantly, the hierarchical social order, comprising caste, class and ethnic identities, seems to echo in the gendered structure of the labour market as well. This volume studies the intertwining of work with embedded patriarchal notions of women's places in designated spheres, and the overt and covert processes of resistance that women offer in defining new roles and old ones anew.