Performing Representation: Women Members in the Indian Parliament
Shirin M. Rai and Carole Spary
Abstract
Breaking new ground in scholarship on gender and politics, Performing Representation is the first comprehensive analysis of women in the Indian Parliament. It explores the possibilities and limits of parliamentary democracy and the participation of women in its institutional performances. Performing Representation offers a new, multi-method analysis of the gendered nature of India’s Parliament. Through an examination of electoral data, media reports, and life stories of women MPs it sheds light on the performance, aesthetics, and norms of parliamentary life. It explores how the gendered axis o ... More
Breaking new ground in scholarship on gender and politics, Performing Representation is the first comprehensive analysis of women in the Indian Parliament. It explores the possibilities and limits of parliamentary democracy and the participation of women in its institutional performances. Performing Representation offers a new, multi-method analysis of the gendered nature of India’s Parliament. Through an examination of electoral data, media reports, and life stories of women MPs it sheds light on the performance, aesthetics, and norms of parliamentary life. It explores how the gendered axis of power underpins the performance of Parliament and its members as well as the political economy in which they are embedded. The book makes a strong case for taking parliamentary politics seriously in these times of populism, without either a utopian framing of women MPs as challengers of masculinized institutional politics or seeing them simply as docile actors in a gendered institution. Performing Representation raises critical questions about the politics of difference, claim-making, representation, and intersectionality. It addresses these questions as part of global feminist debates on the importance of women’s representation in political institutions.
Keywords:
representation,
participation,
gender,
Parliament,
debates,
performance,
gendered axis,
parliamentary democracy,
populism,
politics of difference
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199489053 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780199489053.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Shirin M. Rai, author
Professor, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
Carole Spary, author
Assistant Professor, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham
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