Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation

In Feminist Politics, Intersectionality and Knowledge Cultivation, Radhika Govinda engages with intersectionality - as critical theory, as critical methodology and as critical pedagogy - to make sense of feminist politics in India and beyond, and knowledge-making on feminist politics, as such. In doing so, she makes a case for theory-making, conducting empirical research and classroom teaching to be understood as integral parts of knowledge cultivation, each feeding into the other. Differently put, the book encapsulates Govinda’s engagement, spanning fifteen years and four case studies, exploring what insights an intersectional lens throws up, and how these insights complicate our understandings of marginality, privilege and solidarity in the field of women’s and gender studies, in feminist classrooms, in women’s and social movements, in particular NGO-led feminist activism, state-led development initiatives and digital feminist campaigns, and in everyday social relations in rural and urban spaces. Uncovering, interrogating and disrupting the politics of coloniality and feminist complicity is an important running thread in the book. Through a reflexive account of her own location and practice in the academy at the cusp of the global north and the global south, Govinda highlights the importance of being attentive to intersectional positionality and to the contextual specificities of engaging in feminist politics and knowledge-making in the age of global neoliberalism.

Radhika Govinda is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, UK and the Director of GENDER.ED - the University’s interdisciplinary hub for gender and sexualities studies. Her research and teaching bridge the fields of sociology of gender, international development and South Asian Studies. She is co-editor of Doing Feminisms in the Academy, and Gender in South Asia and Beyond.