Presenter
Hariharan Anusha - Global Interdisciplinary Studies Department, Villanova University, Villanova, United StatesPanel
51 – Intergenerational Innovation in South Asian LifeworldsAbstract
Based on ethnographic work with feminist collectives in Tamil Nadu, India, this paper attends to the intermediations between embodied, intimate feminist solidarities and the construction of feminist memory in intergenerational political spaces. The concept of “generation” has been integral to studying economic shifts, political life and temporality. This paper builds on Tamil feminists’ contextual use of thalaimurai (generation) in political life as marking transformations in activist imaginaries and shifting conceptions of the political. Their use of thalaimurai refrains from presuming an apriori relationality between generations (through kinship), to instead posit political relationships as requiring care labor, in this case, through the work of memory. In tracking feminists’ use of thalaimurai this talk demonstrates an intermediation at play, where the mediated object – memory – also serves as the mediating device. On the one hand, embodied feminist friendships and intimacies mediate the construction of memory, that feminists perform as a form of care for themselves and their histories. On the other, memory-work mediates the formation of new relationalities between generations, thus raising important questions for what political inheritance could mean for feminists in neoliberal India.
