Centre for Gender Studies

Overview

Centre for Gender Studies at RVU is an interdisciplinary space established to promote gender and sexuality inclusive research and teaching. CGS is committed to study the spectrum of inequalities, identities and politics that factor in our everyday lives and challenge the normative idea of gender, heteronormativity, family, pleasure, desire, fantasy, intimacies, etc. Our research objective is situated in intercepting complexities of modern feminisms knotted with white imperialism and postcolonial nationalisms; and decolonising feminist scholarship and praxis. The Centre for Gender Studies has three major focus areas for research- (i) critical approaches to gender; (ii) intersectional approaches to social issues; and (iii) the need for critical discourses in higher education policies and practice. We take a stand in disrupting the narratives of ‘western’ feminism and look at Global South as a centre for knowledge production on queer and trans thought, transnational feminisms and critical legal theory.

From a Southern perspective, it is difficult to use a single lens or framework to analyse socio-economic issues. Colonial continuities and discontinuities in gender and sexuality based practices in the Global South are contested spaces of politics that require us to go beyond the gender lens. The discipline of gender studies has benefitted greatly from non-white views of feminism by disrupting stated assumptions emerging from dominant white feminist discourses. Intersectional feminism has been particularly useful as a way of understanding how intersecting identities operate to marginalise people in unique ways. In this sense, issues of race, caste, religion, class, ability are not disconnected from the production of gender based marginalisation in society, but are rather intrinsically linked to the production of marginalities.

Finally, given our location in academia, members of the centre are also deeply concerned with the manner in which academia functions. Colonialism’s impact on education in India and the Global South is writ large in pedagogical practice, curriculum and policy. Victorian models of classrooms, teaching through ‘discipline’ and ‘surveillance’, and curriculum that panders to the dominant sections of society are deeply embedded in our educational practices. These approaches to education do not help achieve curricular aims and objectives and stymie the development of culturally sensitive individuals. CGS proposes to examine curriculum, curricular policy and pedagogical approaches in higher education from non-normative and critical lenses. This area of research will focus on unpacking masculine approaches to pedagogy, invisibilisation of marginalised communities within the curriculum and unquestioned normativities in curricular policy. This focus area seeks to develop strategies for inculcating alternative and culturally sensitive approaches to pedagogy and curriculum development.

Membership to CGS is open to all academic staff at RVU and students. Individuals based in other higher education institutions in India with an interest in the study of gender and sexuality as well as students at other Universities in India are always invited for CGS events, workshops and internships.