Browsing by Subject "women’s empowerment"

Women’s empowerment, originating from the worldwide feminist debates that took place in the 1980s, has over the years become a widely used, yet a highly contested political concept. For instance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), currently the leading political party in India, represents a powerful nationalist force that has emerged as a vocal supporter of women’s empowerment in the 21st century. In 2018, the BJP published a booklet titled Mahila Morcha Training Guidebook, in which the BJP intentionally seeks to elaborate its present-day party lines on women’s empowerment and women’s ideal role in society. The aim of this thesis is to answer the following research questions: In the Mahila Morcha Training Guidebook, 1) what does the representation of ideal womanhood look like? and 2) what meanings are assigned to women’s empowerment? Qualitative content analysis is employed as the research method, while the theoretical framework of the thesis consists most centrally of Jane Clare Jones’s radical materialist feminist approach to gender and patriarchy, Maria Mies’s analysis of capitalism as a manifestation of patriarchy, Uma Chakravarti’s conceptualisation of brahmanical patriarchy, and Cecília Sardenberg’s conceptual differentiation between liberal and liberating empowerment. The thesis builds on previous feminist studies on Hindu nationalist gender ideology and demonstrates that while the BJP’s vision of ideal womanhood includes both the very traditional idealisation of women as wives and mothers prioritising their duties in the domestic sphere as well as the more recent idealisation of Hindu women as socially active, heroic protectors of the nation that took hold in the 1990’s, it also includes a new element, which is the celebration of successful businesswomen and female professionals’ achievements and contributions to the development of society. As for the second research question, the thesis argues that in addition to certain nationalist elements, the BJP’s conception of women’s empowerment aligns with liberal ideals, economics and development goals when it comes to women’s participation in the public sphere of society, while conservative attitudes implicitly prevail when it comes to gender roles in the private sphere. Based on the research findings of the thesis, the BJP’s conception of women’s empowerment is compared to the early grassroots feminists’ one, in addition to being discussed critically from the author’s feminist point of view. The thesis concludes that the interrelatedness of the BJP’s turn in favour of neoliberal economics in general and its espousal of the liberal approach to women’s empowerment in particular is a consequential phenomenon that demands further feminist analysis