What do young women in 21st century India want? Only a few insignificant things like fundamental rights and equal pay and claiming space(s)...
What do young women in 21st century India want? Only a few insignificant things like fundamental rights and equal pay and claiming space(s) and sexual freedom and to wear what they like and marry who they like or not marry if they like. Women want to be mothers and want to be childfree. Women want to be accepted for and not despite their gender identity. Women want safety inside homes and on public transport and everywhere else.
Sometimes, even without the vocabulary or the articulation of the desire, women want to smash the patriarchy, and do it too, in the everyday actions they perform. Sindhu Rajasekaran’s book, Smashing the Patriarchy: A Guide for the 21st-century Indian Woman, is an attempt at studying the challenges that confront women in (mostly) urban India, and the subversions that are performed by millennial and Gen Z women in their pursuit of self-determination and self-empowerment.
Switching gears from the social activism and struggle for parity that has defined feminism in India and elsewhere, Rajasekaran locates contemporary women’s struggles as decidedly more individual and centred in the still-controversial idea of postfeminism. Owning the contradictions inherent in any “post-” ideological stance, Rajasekaran posits postfeminism not as temporally subsequent to or assumed antithetical to feminism but...
