Asian Feminisms and Youth Activism

The essays in this collection reflect the many ways in which women are not just victims of state (and familial) apparatuses of power across South Asia but have also organized and fought back against heteropatriarchal class and caste oppressions, while supporting their communities against the precarity of our neoliberal times. The Humanities and Social Science methodological approaches that frame the essays represent interdisciplinary mappings of women's rights broadly construed, as these intersect with environmental and ecological interventions, land rights, LGBTQI+ identities and concerns, as well as hitherto unforeseen regressive trends regarding the mobilization/weaponization of religion and masculinist nationalisms in a neoliberal world order. The essays demonstrate how our contemporary moment connects colonial and postcolonial realities in South Asia, showing how these historical eras are deeply intertwined and co-implicated in the resultant inequities spawned by neoliberal globalization, reflecting what the late Nawal el Saadawi dubbed, the patriarchal class system.