Gender Lens

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.