Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Women's Studies

PDF

Faculty Journal Articles

Gender

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2014

Strategic Deployments Of ‘Sisterhood’ And Questions Of Solidarity At A Women’S Development Project In Janakpur, Nepal, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Linguistic uses of ‘sisterhood’ provide a window into disparate understandings of relationality among virtual and actual interlocutors in women’s development across vectors of caste, class, ethnicity and nationality. In this essay, I examine the trope of ‘sisterhood’ as it was employed at a women’s development project in Janakpur, Nepal, in the 1990s. I demonstrate that the use of this common signifier of kinship with culturally disparate ‘signifieds’ created a confusion of meaning, and differential readings of the politics of relationality. In my view, ‘sister,’ as used at this project, was a multivalent, strategically deployed, and divergently interpreted term. In particular, …


How Porous Are The Walls That Separate Us?: Transformative Service-Learning, Women’S Incarceration, And The Unsettled Self, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2012

How Porous Are The Walls That Separate Us?: Transformative Service-Learning, Women’S Incarceration, And The Unsettled Self, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

In this article, we refine a politics of thinking from the margins by exploring a pedagogical model that advances transformative notions of service learning as social justice teaching. Drawing on a recent course we taught involving both incarcerated women and traditional college students, we contend that when communication among differentiated and stratified parties occurs, one possible result is not just a view of the other but also a transformation of the self and other. More specifically, we suggest that an engaged feminist praxis of teaching incarcerated women together with college students helps illuminate the porous nature of fixed markers that …


Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis Jan 2009

Im/Possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, And Affinal Solidarity In Modern South Asia, Coralynn V. Davis

Faculty Journal Articles

Drawing on ethnographic research and employing a micro-historical approach that recognizes not only the transnational but also the culturally specific manifestations of modernity, this article centers on the efforts of a young woman to negotiate shifting and conflicting discourses about what a good life might consist of for a highly educated and high caste Hindu woman living at the margins of a nonetheless globalized world. Newly imaginable worlds in contemporary Mithila,South Asia, structure feeling and action in particularly gendered and classed ways, even as the capacity of individuals to actualize those worlds and the “modern” selves envisioned within them are …