The TCG ‘The Challenge of Gender’ (2024–2027) explores themes broadly related to how questions of gender animate political, economic, and social relations, structures and practices in both India and Germany.
For the last four decades, the category of gender has opened up new lines of enquiry, brought forward new methodologies, and has unsettled academic orthodoxies in disciplines such as history, political science, economics, literature, and performance studies. Gender must be an imperative framework in any understanding of the metamorphoses of the political, since it inflects all relationships of power. The changing signification of gender becomes visible at the interface of politics and feminism. Feminism contests constitutive structures of modern political institutions, for instance divisions between public and private, the state and the domestic, and political and civil societies.
We perceive the variety of disciplines in the TCG, such as anthropology, political science, Indology and history, as a challenge to methodology. In our conceptual workshops, we kept asking “What has the category of gender done to the disciplines?” We felt compelled to turn to gender as a framework of analysis and ask how the lens of gender will transform our conceptual frames as well as our methodology. During the main phase (2017-2024) the former TM5 focused on the following set of cross-cultural enquiries:
(1) “The Lens of Gender: Refiguration of Categories”.
(2) “Gender, Religion, Performance”.
(3) “Gender, Migration, Labour”.
(4) “Gender and Reproductive Technologies”.
(5) “Gender, Violence and the complexities of Law”.
(6)“Gender Diversity and the Politics of Identity”.
In this phase (2024-2027), the TCG will build upon research questions addressed in the main phase of ICAS:MP (2017–2024) by the former TM5, including (1) Care economies and migration within and between India/Germany (2) Gender and life cycles with a focus on ageing (3) Trans *identities (4) Gender dimensions of heterodox/popular and organized/orthodox religiosities (5) Technologies and economics of reproduction (6) a comparative framing of regional feminisms and their vocabularies (7) global gender norms as well as gendered aspects of international relations.
Coordinators:
- Prof. Mary E. John, retd. Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), Delhi
- Prof. Dr. Karin Steiner, Institute of East and South Asian Cultural Studies, Chair of Indology, University of Würzburg
Members:
- Prof. M. Suresh Babu, Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS), Chennai
- Prof. Ummu Salma Bava, JNU, New Delhi
- Dr. Krishna Swamy Dara, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi
- Prof. Dr. Jörg Gengnagel, Institute of East and South Asian Cultural Studies, Chair of Indology, University of Würzburg
- Dr. Philipp Gieg, Institute of Political Science and Sociology, University of Würzburg
- Dr. Barbara Lotz, retd. Institute of East and South Asian Cultural Studies, Chair of Indology, University of Würzburg
- Prof. Janaki Nair, retd. Centre for Historical Studies, JNU
- Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Schömbucher-Kusterer,retd. Institute of East and South Asian Cultural Studies, Chair of Indology, University of Würzburg)
- Prof. Samita Sen, Trinity College, University of Cambridge
