Acclaimed book examines citizenship as embodied and enacted, and explores various perspectives on gender in relation to citizenship

Delhi: Orient BlackSwan India’s leading publishing house has launched a new book on an inter-disciplinary research initiative, titled “Gendered Citizenship: Manifestations and Performance”. The editors of the book are Bishnupriya Dutt who is Professor and Dean in the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University; Janelle Reinelt is Emeritus Professor, University of Warwick and Shrinkhla Sahai is a doctoral researcher at Jawaharlal Nehru University and is an independent media critic, radio professional and Dancer in Delhi.
The book Gendered Citizenship Manifestations and Performance explores how citizenship is differently gendered and performed across national and regional boundaries. Using ‘citizenship’ as its organizing concept, it brings together a collection of multidisciplinary approaches to the legal, socio-cultural and performative aspects of gender construction and identity: violence against women, victimhood and agency, and everyday issues of socialization in a globalized world.
The volume examines citizenship as embodied and enacted, and explores various perspectives on gender in relation to citizenship. The essays featured here analyse citizenship struggles and challenges of recent significant global issues and cover a wide range of social, civic and political spaces.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part titled, Citizenship, Law and Rights asking how citizenship is gendered? : This part is inflected by social science research as the legal and constitutional bases of citizenship as well as its exclusions and suppressions. From a feminist point of view, the codifications of laws and governing structures require a rigidity of definition that can undermine gender-specific rights.
The second part titled, Media, Market, Commodification: Challenging the Vulnerability of Women: Media, Market, Commodification are concerned with the subjection of women to violence and exclusion from citizenship rights. This part looks at cinema, television and documentaries as well as live theatre not only to critique the problems of a cultural production emerging out of the corporatisation of the media portrays critical issues of citizenship, particularly gendered citizenship.
The third part deals with Violence Against Women: ‘Rescue’, Resistance and ‘Empowerment’: Violence against Women focuses directly on situations in which women are denied citizenship rights or become stateless and where the experience of violence complicates any relationship to national citizenship, whether in Colombia or in Kashmir, in sex work or the circus.
This compilation of essays focusing on scholarship, creative practice, and activism would be a useful resource for students, scholars, academicians, activists and artists.
This publication is the outcome of a two-year holistic research project (2014-16) under a common thematic rubric arising from international collaboration between the School of Theatre and Performance studies, University of Warwick, and the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi, that has sought to develop a comparative and yet singular perspective on performance in relation to key political themes facing our countries of origin in the early decades of this century. The research is interdisciplinary and multinational, drawing on Indian, European, and North and South American contexts. More than 30 scholars were part of this project.

The launch witnessed some eminent speakers like Anuradha Kapur – Professor and Theatre Director, Anupama Roy – Professor, Centre for Political Studies, JNU, Ranjani Mazumdar – Professor, Cinema Studies, JNU, Nivedita Menon – Professor, Centre for Comparative Politics and Political Theory, JNU, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU and other distinguished members from academia and media.