“ I did it anyway”: Subjugated Feminist Knowledges and Affective Futures of Girls’ Education in India

• In Event: A Future Advancing Gender Equity

Abstract

Unforgetting histories of gendered control in education, this paper illuminates the continuities of unorganized feminist activism that disrupts modes of gendered control and domination, such as gendered restrictions on mobility and forming romantic relationships in the Indian education system. Drawing from in-depth interviews with young women (aged 18–25) from the Jaat community in India, the paper illustrates how young women persistently rely on mutually constituted desirable girlhood performances in education, such as submissiveness and high academic achievement, and relational transgression, such as hiding romantic partners and forgoing college to travel, to construct subjugated feminist strategies. I argue these acts of 'becoming activists' offer affective decolonial futurities and possibilities for subjugated feminist knowledges like 'rigid timidity' and 'girl time'.

Author

• Namrata Namrata, Arizona State University