Sociology of Gender in India

It is close to six decades since the second phase of the women's movement that brought the gender question to the fore. Fifty years ago, the 1975 United Nations Declaration of the International Women's Year marked the beginning of an institutional recognition of women's studies that led to the establishment of women's studies programmes and courses within academia. India was no exception (V. Mazumdar, 2010; V. Patel, 2023). The last five decades in India have witnessed an exponential expansion of women's studies and disciplinary engagements with gender studies. Indian sociology has seen the emergence of rich, empirical, and conceptual scholarship at the intersection of feminism and sociology (Chaudhuri, 2016). Gender emerged as a key analytical category that studied different aspects of society even as it refashioned the contours of sociology. There have been attempts to map them at different points (Chaudhuri, 1992; 2016; Uberoi, 1996; Rege, 2003; Chadha and Joseph, 2018; P. Kumar, 2018). The focus and treatment of sociology's engagement with gender studies, feminism, and queer studies in India evolved and shifted over the decades. This process has been neither unilinear nor uniform. This edited volume – a collection of twenty-two chapters – represents a new generation of scholarship that showcases the gaps and lags, just as it maps new terrains of research in India. Much of this new scholarship on emerging issues and debates has not yet found a place in any one volume. This book hopes to redeem this lacuna. At the same time, we are acutely aware of the rich work that the first five decades of sociology of gender have produced and upon which this new body of scholarship rests.