Dalit Women Analysis

REVIEW OF LITERATURE:

In this thesis, I am more concerned with attending the three fold discriminations as caste, class and gender against Dalit women in the context of the city of Mumbai. I am very much interested to explore and analyze as to how the intersections of caste and gender have impact on Dalit women’s lives and their experiences of discrimination, domination and oppression. I have given more emphasis on Dalit women’s attempts of resisting their experiences and negotiating their social identity in the urban setting Mumbai. Thus the central problematic of my study is how intersection of caste , class and gender construct and constitute Dalit women’s identity in urban setting , and the way by which Dalit women attempt to reconstruct

Feminist have challenged patriarchal knowledge, ideology, values and its practice. Despite a range of common themes within feminists in understanding patriarchy,some of the feminists do not like the term ‘Patriarchy’ for various reasons, so that they prefer the term “Gender” and “Gender Oppression”. Michele Barrett argues that the term patriarchy assumes that the relation of men and women is unchanging and universalistic. She suggested that it can only be appropriate if it defined very narrowly and refers to specific aspects of ideological relations which those of Father- Daughter relationship (Barrett 1980). The use of term often involves confusion between ‘Patriarchy’ as men’s domination of women. Sheila Rowbotham also argues that ‘the term patriarchy necessarily implies a conception of women’s oppression that is universalistic , ahistoric and essentially biologistic and that it incorrectly leads to a search for a single cause of women’s oppression either in base super- structure model or as quest ultimate origins from capitalist relation’s (Rowbotham,1981).Women’s are facing many kinds of patriarchies which are product of discrimination along with class, caste and community are divers in nature and it is because of the unequal patriarchies that “there is a need to conceptualize the complex articulation of different patriarchies, along with the distinct and equally challenging

The word identity is not just a dictionary definitionbut itreflects the older sense of the word. Our present ideas of identity are fairly recent for social construction rather than complicated one. Even though everyone knows how to use the word identity in everyday life but how to discourse it andproves it was found quit difficult to give a short and adequate definition. Identity is a multilayer concept which uses to construct the caste, class, gender, ethnicity, community and many more. The idea of identity was rooted by James in 1890 about the notion of identity and he argue that there are as many different selves as there are different positions that one holds in the society and thus different groups who respond to the self. The overall self is organized into multiple parts or identities, each of which is tied to aspect of the social structure. Burke has written the article ‘the self: and has explained the measurement of implication from a symbolic intersectionalist perspective (1980)’ and hementions that “an assumption and implication of the self and identity is always related to corresponding identity. He also explained that when one claims an identity in an interaction with others, there is an alternative identity claimed by another to which it is related. Erikson (1951, 1968) has developed a widely used model of identity development. He focused on development of identity via