Department of Women’s Studies

Permanent URI for this communityhttps://ir.nbu.ac.in/handle/123456789/4244

The learners will demonstrate a mastery of the subject by detailed engagement with evolution, development, and current practices in the field of Women's Studies and learn how to effectively conduct research in the field. The guest teachers on the teaching panel have international publications and visits to their credit. Some of them are engaged in collaborative work with the university and in projects in universities abroad. The Department looks forward to producing a regular output of brilliant students and researchers.

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Open Access
Women , Leisure and a Room of Their Own : a Brief Appraisal
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Mitra, Zinia
Open Access
Colours and Crisis: A Study of Cosmopolitan Womanhood in Elkunchwar's Sonata
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Sarkar, Amrita
Open Access
Step towards Liberation: Re-Visiting the English Writings of Begum Rokeya
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Bhattacharya, Dahlia
Open Access
Thinking Beyond Gender: Tagore’s Chitrangada, the Breaking of the Stereotypes
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Saha, Manika
Open Access
Study on the Occupational Status of Women of Matigara Community Development Block, Darjiling District, West Bengal
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Lepcha Nee Lama, Indira; Saha, Tannistha
Open Access
Plagiarism and Feminist Research Ethics
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Chakravorty, Dulika
Open Access
Love Marriage: Women in Sri Lankan Civil War
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Mookherjee, Sanghamitra
Open Access
Socio-Political Status of Women in Ancient India
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Goswami, Gita Rani
Open Access
Warrior with a Pen: Traversing the Feminist Perspective of Ashapurana Devi’s Pratham Pratishruti
(University of North Bengal, 2020-12) Biswas, Debolina
Open Access
Taming the Mind : Women in the Lunatic Asylums of Colonial Bengal
(University of North Bengal, 2021) Bhattacharya, Dahlia
The Lunatic Asylums in the colonial period did not have proper medical treatment or identification of female patients. The infrastructural facilities for the women were not given attention by the asylums.The Victorian morality recognized ‘work’ as a therapy and the ‘mentally ill’ were made to work in the garden, carpentry, grinding wheat and other works, leading to monetary gain in the asylums of Bengal.. The funds were applied to maintain the asylums, sometimes the local jails and led to profits for the British. The paper seeks to look into the colonial policy with regard to asylums and the hard work imposed upon the female lunatics leading to asylum ‘industries’ and how it received a new direction of economic gain.
Open Access
“Where are the tlawmngai Zo/Mizo men?” Gendered living spaces and Masculinity codes
(University of North Bengal, 2021) Chakraborty, Anup Shekhar
In order to address the gender disparities that exist in developing societies, it is necessary to have an understanding of gendered spaces. Institutions, both formal and informal, frequently play a role in determining how a society’s resources, freedoms, and privileges are distributed among its members. This research investigates the matrices of men’s public visibility in relation to the tlawmngaihna code in order to get a better understanding of the pressures that men face in societies that have strong gender norms. The research does this by looking at the world through the lens of men and masculinities. Both the machismo of politics and the edicts of the Nexus of Patriarchy place constraints on the naturalness of men and their capacity to connect with the natural world. The conventional masculine members of the Zo and Mizo ethnic group are reimagined as exemplars of ecologically responsible perfection. Despite this, members of the community and outside observers continue to question their visibility, asking, “Where are the tlawmngai Zo/Mizo men?”
Open Access
About the Contributors :
(University of North Bengal, 2021)
Open Access
Scribbles on Theorizing the Personal in Feminism and Women’s Research
(University of North Bengal, 2021) Mitra, Zinia
The terms "personal" and "political," like "private" and "public," are undergoing important changes in the current era, where Carol Hanisch's famous dictum "the personal is political" still serves as a persuasive justification for more recent uses of primary evidences in research and autobiography studies. Second wave feminism has clearly benefited from the awareness that ‘the personal is political,’ which influenced the growth of social analyses and theories, sparked fresh activities, and expanded the range of topics that could be categorized as ‘feminist issues.’ We have a strong aversion to the notion of subjectivity even in the context of subjective writing projects and are aware of the impersonal, distant tone employed and encouraged in academic works. The article questions why certain personal/subjective information is valued as knowledge or truth while some other information is downplayed or dismissed as anecdotal or just as personal experience, and it proceeds to examine feminist research and interventions in the area.
Open Access
Voices beyond Death: The Spirits of Women in the Short Stories by Rabindranath Tagore
(University of North Bengal, 2021) Sarkar, Sanghita
Fears of ghosts and ghoul and devotion towards the unnumbered local gods and goddess have always been an integral part of Bengali belief system. Inevitably, this has left a profound impact on Bengali literature as well. Be it the great Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore or the compositor of Bengali folk narratives Dakshinaranjan Mitra – spirits and ghosts have always been an inseparable part of Bengali writers’ creations. Though often reduced to the category of children’s fictions, many of these Bengali ghosts’ stories have crossed the boundaries of superstitions and beliefs and plunged into the opaque realm of human psychology. The current paper is an attempt to delve into this uncertain realm of human psyche with the help of three short stories by Rabindranath Tagore – ‘Kankal’ (The Skeleton),’Nishithe’ (In the Night), ‘Monihara’ (The Lost Jewel). The paper with the help of psychoanalytical feministic philosophy has attempted to explore how these ghosts’ stories have gone beyond the limits of local beliefs and superstitious sensations and brought out the problematic representation of gender roles and identities in contemporary Bengali society. In order to bring out the societal fissures the current paper here tries to raise such hypothetical questions as: i) How do these short stories expose in a covert manner the subjugation of the women in contemporary Bengali society? ii) How has the woman-self obtained voice after death in these short stories? iii) How do these stories register protests by the woman-spirits against the patriarchal Bengali socio-cultural beliefs and system?
Open Access
Gender Roles and the Quest for Identity: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s That Long Silence
(University of North Bengal, 2021) Akram, Wasim
Women in all ages remain the object of suppression. They often neither have any voice nor an independent identity of their own. Men become the deciding factor about how a woman should behave and act. They have always been taught to be docile, submissive, and conventional to be accepted by the society. They are made to behave in a certain stereotypical way to maintain the male supremacy. They are given a position inferior to men in a hierarchical social structure, controlled and dominated by men and they merely serve as objects of this control and rule. The whole purpose of their existence revolves around serving in the family as someone’s daughter, wife, sister or mother. These stereotypical gender roles assigned to them by the society keep them confined within the four walls of familial entanglement where they do not have any voice or agency. Shashi Deshpande in her novel, That Long Silence captures this traumatized and painful existence of women in a middle-class Indian family. The novelist portrays the ever-suffering existence and the quest for independent identity of women through the presentation of the character of Jaya who has to maintain silence throughout her married life for the fear of disrupting familial comfort and security. I, in my paper, will attempt to address this crisis raised by the author and also show how the society creates a boundary for women to delimit their capabilities and stifle their voice and agency in a constrictive social structure that does not allow women to speak.
Open Access
“Equality and not about Equal Rights”: Redefining Fourth-Wave Inclusion and Intersectionality through the Digital Platform Agent of Ishq
(University of North Bengal, 2021) Hazra, Mousumi
The definition of the historically abounding F-Word, Feminism, is continuously being shifted from one notion to another, varying in accord with class, caste, and gender across generations. Starting with the website Everyday Sexism launched by Laura Bates in 2012, Fourth wave feminism has recently witnessed a paradigmatic shift from the previous waves of feminism. Currently, as we consider the fluidity of gender construction and interact with various forms of it every day, social media or representation of women on-screen has been one of the most influential factors behind constructing our ‘already gendered’ selves. As the applications of power disseminate the idea of empowerment, equality and freedom also differ alongside. Hence, today’s feminism looks up to a lot more exposure where people can put themselves out there without adhering to any kind of censorship or asceticism. This approach has been productively exercised through the online multimedia digital platform Agent of Ishq, directed and introduced by the filmmaker Paromita Vohra in 2015. This research will initially be focused on the way how some mainstream Indian movies, featured to be among the ‘top 10 feminist films’, formed the idea of feminism vis-à-vis how far the feminist implication through Agent of Ishq addresses and adheres to the current ‘wave’ of feminism in India. Keywords:
Open Access
Power, Patriarchy and Women’s Agency in Microfinance
(University of North Bengal, 2021) Chakroborty, Bhaskar
Technological innovation and environmental degradation have been prime agents for the existence and altering of social systems, historically world over. If latter provides basic resources for survival and sustenance and builds essential link between man and nature for human existence; the other provides tools (machines, industries etc.) with which to exploit resources for the same by earning livelihood (central to work). There are the changes seen and experienced not only in material world in terms of change in economic production from agriculture to industry, but also in terms of gender relations, with respect to women and work; especially because their work has been considered as informal and soft menial household work. Various theorists have studied this relationship between women and work (especially in the context of rural agriculture and allied activities), by framing an essential link between women, production and technological innovations. The paper focuses on the changing nature of work in relation to women’s participation in agriculture, as central to development. Then it looks at women empowerment thorough microfinance assistances.
Open Access
‘Matinee Idol’ and his Spectators: The Female and the Male Gaze
(University of North Bengal, 2021) Sen, Sudarshana
The 24 July 1980 was a fateful day for the Bengali movie viewers. The superstar of Bengali cinema breathed his last. The year 2020 marked his fortieth death anniversary. The euphoria with the star of fifties and sixties lasts even today. His mannerisms, styled acting and his charisma had inflated profit for the producer, showered fame for himself creating a furor among the cine-goers. This article will focus on how spectatorship and gendered gaze can build a ‘star’ and what their relation to the star may be and what were the elements that acted as a catalyst to this.
Open Access
Superflat and Post-Gender: A Case Study of female bodies in Ghost in the Shell and Paprika
(University of North Bengal, 2022-12) Dewan, Arghyadip
This article studies the representation of female bodies in two anime films: Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) to study how the post apocalyptic cyborg and the dream realm’s alter ego both subvert the gender oriented paradigms by becoming Superflat bodies in a postgender space. Takashi Murakami’s Superflat manifesto talks about the bricolage of multiple flattened layers superimposed onto one another to create a composite surface of multiple focal points where meaning exists on the surface itself rather than the interior. In both Ghost in the Shell and Paprika we see the melting of the outside into the inside. The post apocalyptic Niihama City and the unstable kaleidoscopic dream realm both are examples of what Susan J Napier terms “fantasyscapes” where the body goes through the Guattarian “a-signifying semiotic” process to create unlimited intersections of signs, identities, images and self-images. This contributes to the Superflat “delimiting” (Looser, 2006: 108) of the body where its symbiosis with both technology and the cybernetically created alter ego takes place. It also blurs the boundaries between body and commodity. Thus the bodies of Major Mokoto Kusanagi/The Puppet Master in Ghost in the Shell and Dr.Chiba Atsuko/Paprika in Paprika become examples of Superflat bodies in a post-gender future.
Open Access
Ignored Voices: An Overview of the life of the Women with Disabilities in India.
(University of North Bengal, 2022-12) Das, Tinku
It has been held from ancient times that men and women are not equal. Some socially prescribed identities have been forced onto both genders. Based on people's biological or physiological differences, performances, competence, retention, and other capacities, society has developed some negative conceptions and established some binaries such as normal/abnormal, able/disabled, fit/unfit, etc. In order to oppress women, patriarchal society has created separate standards for men and women. It views women as weak human beings who serve as spouses, mothers, nurses, and sisters. In a culture that is governed by men, women lack freedom and safety. Men have always held a higher standing than women and are still are viewed as more significant than women. There have been different waves of feminism with their own charter of demands regarding women’s rights but there was no particular demand for women with disabilities. It seems that women with disabilities have no purpose in this world and are considered as useless in the society. Even at the very onset the women who struggled for their rights and identities did not raise their voices for women with disabilities. Harlan Hahn, a disability activist and political scientist has observed that disabled women often encounter “asexual objectification”. Though the world of words masculine and feminine are categorized but women with disability have no category and have been deprived and treated as untouchables. The paper discusses this lack of voice in favour of women with disabilities that pushes them towards more uneasy world.