Practicing decoloniality 1/3: Decolonial discomforts

On Wednesday 22nd February 2017, PhD students at the Gender Institute organised a roundtable discussion and interactive workshop titled Practicing Decoloniality in Gender Studies. This short series of posts presents the transcripts of the three speakers’ discussion papers, kicking off with Priya Raghavan’s reflections on her encounters with decoloniality in the neoliberal academy during her first year of PhD studies

Resisting the binary: reconciling victimhood and agency in discourses of sexual violence

Dominant discourses of sexual violence institute a binary imaginary of victimhood and agency, producing subjects as either victims or agents but never simultaneously both. This thesis tracks the production and effects of the victim/agent binary, and explores conceptual strategies and archival resources through which to challenge the binary, and interrupt the coercive and exclusionary politics it enables. I argue that the figure of the agentless victim occasions a protectionist response to sexual violence, justifying the expansion of the carceral, patriarchal state, and animating violent and exclusionary nationalisms. Simultaneously, the victim/agent binary becomes grounds for the denial of victimhood to subaltern subjects who are read as agentival, where agency is reinterpreted as culpability. In the context of post-colonial India, I identify case law, legislative reform and dominant feminist responses to sexual violence as key sites at which this binary is installed. These discursive fields are overdetermined by liberal investments in autonomous, unfettered modes of agency, foreclosing the possibility of representing or attending to subaltern subjects whose realities are marked by simultaneous conditions of victimhood and agency. Through a feminist historical ontology of victimhood and agency, I challenge the ‘givenness’ of the victim/agent binary in the dominant archive by assembling what I call a subaltern archive, comprised of letters, petitions, pamphlets, interviews, rural newsletters, slogans, chants and other ephemera. A feminist historical ontology insists on the epistemic significance of subaltern archives as sites of concept-building, and brings into view the possibility of non-binary conceptual productions of victimhood and agency. Extending post-colonial, dalit, and Black feminist interventions, I offer a conceptualisation of agency that departs from liberal, autonomous orthodoxies, insisting on a more expansive account that is able to capture the often concealed and ephemeral ways in which agency manifests in conditions of violence and oppression. Simultaneously, I propose a structural, intersectional account of victimhood as an experience of gendered harm rather than an essential, defining gendered attribute, challenging the biological and psychological accounts of victimhood in dominant discourses. Based on these conceptual realignments of victimhood and agency emerging from the subaltern archive, I argue that within discourses of sexual violence, agency must be understood and represented as not simply compatible with, but often deriving precisely from and in response to experiences of victimhood

A retrospective study on endometrial patterns in abnormal uterine bleeding

Background: To determine the type of endometrial patterns of the different age categories of women who presented as a case of abnormal uterine bleeding.Methods: This is a retrospective study conducted on 105 patients who presented with abnormal uterine bleeding who underwent fractional curettage in our hospital. The data on their age, presenting complaints, and comorbidities of all the women were collected. The patterns of endometrial changes were studied and classified.Results: The most common histopathological findings were anovulatory shedding (34.3%) and irregular shedding (18.1%). The other findings include irregular ripening, papillary endocervicitis, endocervicitis, pill endometrium, atrophic endometrium, squamous metaplasia, and endometrial hyperplasia. The most common malignant change seen was endometrioid carcinoma which was seen in women over 40 years of age.Conclusions: Histopathological examination of the endometrium shows a clear-cut differentiation between physiological and malignancy changes in the endometrium. Hence, endometrial sampling is considered the golden tool for accurate analysis of the endometrium

The Cauvery Conflict (NIAS Backgrounder No. B5-2010)

T he conflict over sharing of the waters of the Cauvery has spread over more than a century, involving four prominent contenders in South India– the riparian states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the union territory of Pondicherry. Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have historically clashed on the issue, dating back to the times of the British-controlled Madras Presidency and the Princely State of Mysore while Kerala entered the fray on the reorganisation of states in 1956 and Pondicherry, only in the 1970s. While two treaties, the Agreements of 1892 and 1924, held the peace between Mysore and Madras through the last few decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the sharing of Cauvery waters once again turned contentious with Tamil Nadu alleging a violation of the terms of one of the treaties by Karnataka, and conflicting interpretations by the two states of a clause of the 1924 agreement. Tamil Nadu stood at a historical advantage in terms of irrigation development and Karnataka claimed its right to accelerate its exploitation of the waters. Through the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, series of talks between the states failed to establish a solution agreeable to all the parties involved. Finally, in 1990, the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal was instituted with the purpose of arriving at a watersharing formula between the states. The Tribunal released an interim order in 1991 and eventually, 17 years after its creation, announced its final verdict in 2007. However, the order is as yet unimplemented as a Special Leave Petition on the matter remains pending in the Supreme Court

Family, politics and popular television: an ethnographic study of viewing an Indian serial melodrama

This thesis explores the popularity in India of a contemporary prime time television serial, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because Mother-in-law was Once a Daughter-in-law) which is now the longest running serial in India. Locating the emergence of this new genre of ‘family serial melodrama’ in light of the commercialisation, fragmentation and diversification of the Indian television marketplace, the thesis outlines public concerns about this generic development, and analyses the textual hybridity of this serial. In the context of these interrelated industrial, social and textual developments in television, the thesis then drawing on ethnographic perspectives illuminates the micro-social dynamics involved in the appeal of Kyunki, especially within a broad understanding of the nature of family viewing. Through its case study of the serial, the thesis quite explicitly demonstrates that appeal of even the apparently most ‘trivial’ television lies in the ways in which television contributes to political constructions of society through the discursive space it forms for viewers to forge social meanings and negotiate structures of social power. The ‘multidimensional’ approach the thesis appropriates and develops upon in pursuing this investigation, contributes significantly also to the emergent and evolving field of ‘third generation’ audience studies, particularly in its focus on family, more so in its observations of family dynamics and discourses. In addressing questions specifically about audiences’ relationship with the serial, the thesis drawing on the ethnographic interviews with viewers and their families, argues that for audiences the serial offers a representation of India simultaneously in notions of family and transcendent ideas of womanhood. Analysis of these notions further reveal how realms of the ideal, real and unreal form an important conceptual spectrum through viewers make sense and negotiate meanings, and contribute in politically constructing society. In this way demonstrating that appeal of this seemingly ‘trivial’ television programme is also in the space it provides for political negotiations, the thesis conclusively suggests that study of popular narratives, especially feminine narratives, must invariably be considered within the frame of ‘politics’ while also customarily with ‘pleasure’

Securing the nation through the politics of sexual violence: tracing resonances between Delhi and Cologne

Postcolonial and black feminist scholars have long cautioned against the dangerous proximity between the politics of sexual violence and the advancement of nationalist and imperial projects. In this article, we uncover what it is in particular about efforts to address sexual violence that makes them so amenable to exclusionary nationalist projects, by attending to the political aftermaths of the rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012, and the cases of mass sexual abuse that took place during New Year's Eve in Cologne in 2015. Tracing the nationalist discourses and policies precipitated in their wake, we demonstrate how across both contexts, the response to sexual violence was ultimately to augment the securitizing power and remit of the state-albeit through different mechanisms, and while producing different subjects of/for surveillance, control and regulation. We highlight how in both cases it is through contemporary resonances of a persistent (post)colonial echo- which enmeshes the normative female body with the idea of the nation-that sexual abuse becomes an issue of national security and the politics of sexual violence becomes tethered to exclusionary nationalisms. Revealing the more general, shared, rationalities that bind the nation to the normative female body while attending to the located political reverberations that make this entanglement so affectively potent in the distinct contexts of India and Germany helps distinguish and amplify transnational and intersectional feminist approaches to sexual violence that do not so readily accommodate nationalist ambitions

Study comparing 3 hour and 24 hour post-operative removal of bladder catheter and vaginal pack following vaginal surgery: a randomised controlled trial

Abstract Background Traditional practice after vaginal hysterectomy was to keep the vaginal pack and urinary catheter for 24 hours post operatively. But there were studies that prolonged cathterisation was associated with urinary infection. So this study was conducted to compare the post operative outcome when the urinary catheter and vaginal pack were removed after 3 hours and after 24 hours after surgery. Methods The study was done in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, in a tertiary teaching institute of South India from September 2008 to March 2010. It was a randomised controlled trial involving 200 women undergoing vaginal surgery, who were randomly assigned to 2 groups – catheter and vaginal pack were removed either in 3 h in study group or were removed in 24 h in control group. The outcome of the study were vaginal bleeding, urinary retention, febrile morbidity, and urinary infection. Results There was no significant difference between the study and control groups with respect to vaginal bleeding (0 and 1%, p = 1), urinary retention (9 and 4%, p = 0.15), febrile morbidity (7 and 4%, p = 0.35), and urinary infection (26% in each group, p = 1.0). Conclusion Keeping the urinary catheter and vaginal pack for 24 h following vaginal surgery does not offer any additional benefit against removing them after 3 h

SuPWR India BMMA First Reflective Workshop

Audio-visual content from first reflective workshop November 202

Association mapping in rice: basic concepts and perspectives for molecular breeding

In the last decade, association mapping (AM) has become a well-established method to detect genes and quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with agronomically important traits. The identification of a large number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from genome sequencing and concurrent development of high-throughput genotyping platforms has led to AM being widely used for a range of crops. These technologies have been used in rice (Oryza sativa) to explore the abundant diversity and there is enormous potential to identify novel QTLs for traits of interest. Due to the availability of cost-effective high-throughput SNP genotyping methods and rapid developments in rice genomics, it is inevitable that these AM approaches will become more popular in the future, especially in the context of genome-wide association studies (GWASs). In this paper, we review the fundamental concepts, critical considerations and limitations of AM focusing on rice, and reiterate the importance of accurate phenotypic data. We also include a section about connecting GWAS to molecular breeding, covering practical consideration for breeders, which is required to use GWAS results in actual rice molecular breeding programs and which has not received adequate attention in the scientific literature