Digital Commons Network^™

Matrilineality, Water Knowledge And Networks, And The Position Of Women In Rural Tanzania, Ruth Aernout, Sara Dewachter, Nathalie Holvoet

Journal of International Women's Studies

This article reports on a study of the effect of matrilineality on a community’s social fabric in the Morogoro region of Tanzania. We used water information-sharing networks as a proxy for social interaction, with water accessibility, functionality, and quality being highly problematic in the area under study. This is a situation that particularly affects women, who are generally responsible for household water provision yet are excluded from water management institutions. Drawing on network and survey data and focus group discussions, the differences in inter-gender interaction, inclusiveness, and women’s status were explored by comparing a matrilineal and mixed patri-matrilineal community. We …

Women And The Precarity Of War: Reading Women Militants And Activists In Sharmila Seyyid’S Ummath, Aparna Nandha

Journal of International Women's Studies

Ummath, written by Sharmila Seyyid, navigates the sensitive topic of the precarious lives of three separate women amid the chaos of war-torn Sri Lanka. The stories of main characters Yoga and Theivanai demonstrate women’s challenges in and out of militancy. Their struggles led them to Thawakkul, a Muslim social worker devoted to the cause of rehabilitating disabled and widowed women who once served the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam). Ummath provides a powerful social critique of the conditions that aggravated the separatist conflict, the stigmatization of women who become part of the LTTE, the inexorable violence perpetrated by …

“Gender At The Root Of Everyday Life”: Equity, Activism, And The Perspectives Of Diana J. Fox, Goutam Karmakar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This in-depth conversation with Diana J. Fox, Professor of Anthropology at Bridgewater State University, Massachusetts, United States, and a cultural and applied anthropologist, scholar-activist, and documentary film producer, puts emphasis on how Fox’s research demonstrates that a decolonial feminist viewpoint inspires and even necessitates that Indigenous feminisms be at the center, and that researchers from the global north have a responsibility to do so. In this interview, Fox talks about how, as a feminist decolonial/anticolonial anthropologist, she has worked for global gender justice and equality throughout her career, especially within the Anglophone Caribbean, which is where the bulk of her …

Women And War: (Dis)Illusionment And Disclosure In Niromi De Soyza’S Tamil Tigress, Goutam Karmakar

Journal of International Women's Studies

Niromi de Soyza’s Tamil Tigress: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka’s Bloody Civil War (2011) is a memoir about a year in the author’s and her friend Ajanthi’s lives when they joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) and fought as female militants in the second phase of the Sri Lankan civil war. Soyza’s autobiographical account depicts the 1980s when the Tamil Tigers were fighting the Sri Lankan government and the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF) in the northern and eastern parts of the country. As teenagers, Niromi and Ajanthi were highly inspired by the revolutionary …

On Violence And Resistance: Narratives Of Women In South Asia, Goutam Karmakar

Journal of International Women's Studies

No abstract provided.

Mothers And Daughters: Reclaiming The Besieged Body Of Woman In Ashapurna Debi’S Trilogy, Subhadeep Ray, Goutam Karmakar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This paper offers a close reading of the intergenerational trilogy by Ashapurna Debi, one of the first-canonized women-novelists of post-independence India: Pratham Pratisruti (The First Promise), 1965, Subarnalata, 1967, and Bakul Katha (Bakul’s Story), 1974. Reconstituting a history of almost two centuries and countering the colonial/postcolonial grand narratives, these novels act as a saga of Bengali Hindu lower and middle-class women’s plight under and resistance against a patriarchal social order operating at the most intimate levels of domestic relationships. Ashapurna Debi’s treatment of the intricacies of gender inequality and a woman’s response to the violence …

Discourse(S) Of Identity: Precarity And (In)Visibility In Farida Karodia’S Daughters Of The Twilight, Goutam Karmakar, Rajendra Chetty

Journal of International Women's Studies

Apartheid South Africa witnessed the forming of cultural and sexual identities within political strategies that were designed to categorize and regulate “non-white” individuals. By dealing with interactions between white men and black women, South African literary works in the penultimate years of apartheid demonstrate apartheid’s structural viciousness and gendered hierarchy through certain innovative deviations. Daughters of the Twilight (1986) by Farida Karodia is one such text that not only sheds light on the masculine, racialized, and patriarchal apartheid structure of the male gaze, but also inherently disallows the female characters of Karodia’s narrative to inhabit neither day nor night, as …

Feminism And Intersectionality: Black Feminist Studies And The Perspectives Of Jennifer C. Nash, Goutam Karmakar

Journal of International Women's Studies

This in-depth conversation with Jennifer Christine Nash, the Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, USA, aims to illuminate the complexities of intersectionality in feminist discourse. This interview focuses on Nash’s work and perspectives on intersectionality in relation to gender, class, race, sexuality, and hierarchies of power and privilege. This interview discusses precarity, vulnerability, and intersectionality in black feminist discourse, as well as the marginalisation of black women’s heterogeneity, the politics of reading associated with intersectionality, and the relationship between temporality and intersectionality. Additionally, this conversation discusses Nash’s monograph, Black Feminism Reimagined (2019), post-intersectionality …

Health Issues Of Mothers In Assam:An Analytical Assessment Of National Family Health Surveys, Abdur Rashid Ahmed

Journal of International Women's Studies

Maternal mortality is one of the most serious public health concerns around the globe especially in developing countries like India. WHO estimated that almost 40% of pregnant women and 42% of children less than 5 years of age are anaemic globally and one-third of all women of reproductive age is also anaemic, and around half of maternal deaths in the world occur due only to anaemia. But the prevalence of anaemia among pregnant women in India has marginally declined as reported by the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS). Using secondary data provided by NFHS, the study reveals that the …

“From Margin To Center”: Processes And Relationships To Participation One Woman’S Ethnographic Journey Mirrored Through Community Research, Melise D. Huggins

Journal of International Women's Studies

In the closing two years of my doctoral degree that spanned ten years of my life, I was asked by a mentor to write a personal essay on my academic experiences at the university. That essay follows and is printed here not without the accompanying editing that marshaled its own questioning, self-reflection and analysis that comes with distance, wisdom, and the editor of a juried journal.

I was concerned to give a revisionist accounting now, another five or six years after the writing of the essay, to explain what my perspective was then as a disaffected African- American ABD (all …

Women, Occupation, Collective Loss And Support: The Experience Of “From A Bereaved Woman To Another”, Sohail Hassanein

Journal of International Women's Studies

This study derives its force from experiences of Palestinian women, occupation and loss project that aims at describing and understanding the role of holistic intervention based on the mutual support approach “from a bereaved woman to another.” The qualitative method has been utilized, with a view to reaching an integrated description, analysis and explanation of the experience that has been documented in details, through using special documentation forms. The results reveal that changes have taken place to bereaved women and supportive bereaved ones, as a result of participation in support and through training meetings. The findings demonstrate that women have …