The positive side of co-optation? Intersectionality: a conversation between Inderpal Grewal and Srila Roy

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Notes on contributors

Inderpal Grewal is Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is the author and editor of many volumes of feminist thought. Her forthcoming book is entitled, Exceptional Citizens? Advanced Neoliberalism, Surveillance and Security in Contemporary USA (Duke University Press 2016).

Srila Roy is Associate Professor in sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She is the author of Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (Oxford University Press 2012) and is currently writing a monograph on feminist politics in globalized India.

Acknowledgments

Srila Roy would like to thank the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, South Africa for making this interview and its transcription possible (via a NIHSS/ICSSR grant). Thanks are also due to Upasana Agarwal for transcription, Sara de Jong, Susanne Kimm and the IJFP editors for incredible editorial input, and most of all, to Inderpal Grewal.

Notes

1. Grewal is referencing the anti-rape mass protests that took place in India after the gang rape and murder of a young medical student in Delhi in December 2012. The protests were unprecedented in scale (occurring at the national as well as global level), composition (“ordinary citizens”) and impact (changes to the rape law in India).

2. Prime Minister Narendra Modi began his tenure following the victory of the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP)-led coalition in the 2014 general elections. He belongs to the BJP, which currently holds an absolute majority in the lower house of the Indian Parliament. The party pursues a stringent neoliberal agenda coupled with Hindu majoritarian politics.

3. The UN Decade of Women culminated in the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. The Conference is seen as an important catalyst for the transnationalization and NGOization of women's movements in the Global South.