Gender Lens (Hardback) | Released: 01 Jul 2011

As the title suggests the present book Gender lens, Women's issues and perspectives in Contemporary Societies, explores the cultural meanings of gender and gender differences in the rapidly changing societies that offer us a multitude of meanings in these new contexts. It makes us think critically not only about gender but about other social divisions as well some of which have entered the mainstream vocabulary only now. Change has suddenly been thrust on our society propelling it into the future bringing about large scale transformations that have made our society unrecognizable, highlighting a fundamental disconnect between representations and the ground reality of today. Scholars are still unpacking these changes to better understand the workings of society and have forced us to do a rethink on the viability of categories employed forcing us to locate them in a new context. The aim of this work is to expand our knowledge and understanding of women in our own society and also about women who are living in societies very different from us. This book is an interdisciplinary work that places gender at the intersection of society, caste, race, sexuality and work. These structural forces have shaped the individual and collective lives of women across diverse cultures and times as well as provide analytical categories for critically examining the worlds in which we live. The book highlights on themes related to the women's movement, governance, caste, class and race, work and labor, violence and sexual harassment, health, fundamentalism and women in margins besides information and communication technology. It is a challenge to incorporate all the varieties that characterize the diverse issues related to women in today's world. While a fundamental shift is seen in all the fields these categories employed for understanding society are also not static further problematizing our frames of reference. On this dissimilar template the forces of modernity and of late, the knowledge economy via the cyberspace as the most visible forms have generated new forms of patriarchy. Therefore we now have a rainbow of struggles to reclaim women's space in all these domains that make a colorful mosaic. The challenges here are to give voice to the narratives which use very different categories that cannot be understood without the contexts and also cannot be fully reduced to writing and yet explore the varied cultural meanings of gender and gender differences.
About the Author: Prof. Rekha Pande is the Head of Centre for Women's Studies and a faculty in the Department of History at University of Hyderabad. Her work is in the Inter disciplinary area of History and Women's Studies. She is the author of Divine sounds from the Heart, 2010, Cambridge Scholars publishing, U.K, Religious Reform movement in Medieval India ( 2005) Gyan Publishers, New Delhi, Gender issues in the Police (2000) S.V.P. National Police Academy, Hyderabad, Child Labour in the Beedi industry( 1998), Delta Publishers, Hyderabad, and Succession Struggle in the Delhi Sultanate (1990) Commonwealth Publication, New Delhi. She has been the Editor of, International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP), Rout ledge Taylor and Francis group, U.K. She received the International Visiting Fellowship in the School of Policy Studies, in the University of Bristol, U.K Academic Fellow, University of Buffalo, USA and International Visiting Scholar, at Maison De Research, Paris. She has been the Project Director of thirty three Projects. She is the Member of Board of Studies in a large number of Universities in India. She has widely traveled in India and abroad to deliver Key note addresses and lectures and present papers in National and International Conferences.