Prof. Rekha Pande, senior faculty in the Department of History at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) has edited a book titled, Gender Lens: Women’s issues and Perspectives. This book has been brought out by Rawat Publication, New Delhi, ISBN No. 978-81-316-0628-5.
The book Gender lens, Women’s issues and perspectives, 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. Its aim 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 ours. This book is an interdisciplinary work that places gender at the intersection of society, caste, marginality, 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, Caste, class and Governance, Work and Labor, Violence and Sexual Harassment, Marginality and Health issues. It is a challenge to incorporate all the varieties that characterize the diverse issues related to women in contemporary societies. This task becomes even more difficult in the third world and particularly in a country like India which is a byword for diversity. Therefore we now have a rainbow of struggles all over the world to reclaim women’s space in all these domains that make a colorful mosaic. The challenge here is 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.