Gender in the Himalaya – Kim Berry, Shubhra Gurunani

Gender In the Himalaya: Cultural Politics of Gendered Identity, Place and Positionality engages with the vibrant field of feminist scholarship and brings together a collection of papers by scholars who have long-term research relations with communities in the Himalayan region. In considering the Himalaya as a frontier that is constituted by a range of context-specific forces as well as historically and politically positioned actors, the papers engage with the Himalayan region but are at once attentive to trans-local forces that configure gendered relations of work, mobility, mobilization, development, and activism. Through a critical reading of colonial and nationalist gendered discourses, the contributors demonstrate how gendered relations and subjects are configured through the projects of development, feminism, regional autonomy, and neo-liberalism more broadly. By drawing on their sustained engagement with specific field sites and participation with various local and non-local interlocutors, the collections offers a grounded assessment of the ways that feminist readings of everyday practices can illuminate cultural politics of difference, inequality, and exclusion. Of additional concern to several of the authors are the politics of knowledge production, including the ethics of transnational feminist scholarship, and the politics of positionality in research and representation.
Cover: Painting by a Maithil woman from Janakpur, Nepal, in a style that has become known internationally for its use of color to depict scenes from great epics and deities of the region as well as the plants and animals that are integral to the lives of Maithil women.

Gender in the Himalaya – Shubhra Gurunani, Kim Berry