Complicated Instructions: Exploring Antagonisms in Woman's Era

Abstract

How are the everyday practices, interests, beliefs, aspirations, and desires of “Indian women” discursively constructed through the representational codes of recent editions of the magazine Woman's Era? Some older studies of the by now forty-year-old fortnightly magazine need to be complemented to understand the changes in content now observable in it. For instance, there might be a greater degree of ambivalence and apparent inconsistency than noted before in what is valued or devalued by Woman's Era as “western,” “traditional,” and “modern.” This essay outlines some antagonisms manifested in Woman's Era to clarify the scope of its changing representations of “Indian women.”