World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 187

Sarkar, Said and a whole host of others, are at pains to express. In standing apart from that which is brave and courageous in Daly's writings, I wish to make a plea for the experiences of difference expressed by numerous cultural feminists and activists. These experiences move us towards the fostering of notions of gender and identity from the margins. New kinds of universals may help to shape our notions of body, identity, self, secularity, and history. In this respect my exploration of the Indian tradition does not differ from that of Daly, but is defined by generation and cultural identity. Furthermore, a postmodern analysis of self, culture, and gender allows for a greater particularization of context than a purely radical feminist analysis, based on gender difference alone. This conceptual difference need not transcend a gender-based analysis but aught to contextualize and be inclusive of such differences along with other differences.
Plurality and Sacred Spaces
With the increase in right wing religious fundamentalism, it is necessary to undertake a historical and epistemic analysis of women's spirituality. The representation of woman as it emerges from religious institutions often encodes and encapsulates role models in a prescriptive manner. In this discursive attempt I will not compete with historical realism but constitute a series of dialectic questions, which are of importance for myself. Deep seated paradoxes can be seen at close hand in the lives of family and friends with relation to this ambit of religion, spirituality, and agency. In writing against the grain of male scholasticism, I wish to voice a series of dialectic questions central to the epistemic construction of sacred spaces, empowerment and spirituality. The oft quoted shadows of disempowerment and inscription by religious dogma may be as being historically constructed. For instance, there can be a tendency to valorize of Hinduism, as being beyond history, operating in the realm of myth and mystification. In the process, in many academic and popular Orientalist writings, the historically constructed experiences of women are often ignored. The actions of indigenous activists who fight a cause may be seen as reactionary and nonintellectual by first-world poststructuralists. The promotion of the notion of third-world women and compassion also often essentialized. The stepping back into the purview of history to examine socio-economic and political causes of gender injustice is an unfashionable exercise towards Enlightenment values of humanism and justice. But it also reflects a move towards an examination of the impact of the double injunction of colonialism and patriarchal practices and the resistance moments that this has generated. In the contemporary debates towards non- essentializing compassion and justice, feminist agency in the non-Western world appears to be generating a body of knowledge that at some point stands apart also from the language of oppression by racism and sexism. The 'Other Revolution,' a large scale democratic NGO (nongovernmental organization) movement, speaks to this as a leitmotif of empower
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