Articles by Nivedita Menon

Feminism requires us to recognise that "women" is neither a stable nor a homogeneous category. Does intersectionality as a universal framework help us to capture this complexity? This paper argues that it does not. It addresses this question through the intricacies of the terrain that feminist politics must negotiate, using the Indian experience to set up conversations with feminist debates and experiences globally. Feminism is heterogeneous and internally differentiated. We need to pay attention to challenges to the stability of given identities-- including those of "individual" and "woman." These challenges constitute the radically subversive moments that are likely to be most productive for feminism in the 21st century.

Since the Allahabad High Court judgment was delivered on 30 September 2010, historians, political commentators, legal scholars and lawyers have all produced serious and engaged critiques of the judgment pointing out flaws in reasoning and law. Based on this substantial body of reflection, this paper develops a composite picture of the problems with the judgment.

In the light of the recent demands raised by sections of the intelligentsia urging the government to heed the CPI(Maoist) “offer of talks”, we insist that “civil society” should rather put pressure on the government to initiate talks with representatives of all struggling popular and adivasi orga

A well-known opposition in globalisation debates is "the national versus the postnational" in which the static nation, defined forever by symbols of identity produced in the now-irrelevant era of nation states, is counterposed to the dynamic postnational corporation, located everywhere and nowhere, resisting the parochialism of national pride and national symbols. The term "postnational" is developed here in a sense different from that promoted by corporations and the self-defined "global civil society", which conceives of it simply as spaces above and beyond the nation state. Moreover, in a world in which dominant discourses valorise "flows", "fluidity" and "translatability", the term postnational may offer us a vantage point that insists on location in the face of translatability, while simultaneously insisting that "location" is autonomous of the nation state.

Ramachandra Guha's positive reading of the mid-1950s legislation that made up the Hindu Code is a simple, feel-good, nationalist telling that is trite, conventional and utterly misleading. A significant body of research has argued that the "reformed" Hindu Code was not only very far from offering equal rights to women, it in fact took away many existing, more liberal customary provisions available to women of different communities and castes. Guha also offers a stereotypical division of the social sciences into History, Sociology, Political Science, etc. A number of scholars - the feminists being the first - have breached the disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences that were established in the 19th century. This is the first of three comments on Guha's article, 'The Challenge of Contemporary History' (June 28, 2008).